Work Matters

Author: supermoxie

  • Learning from “Positive Deviants:” Pitfalls to Avoid

    Better
    A
    couple weeks ago, I raved about Better: A
    Surgeon’s Notes on Performance,     in a post I wrote over at The Working Life ­on Masters of the Obvious. Author and surgeon Atul Gawande provides a
    series of compelling essays about how, through one tiny small step at a time,
    by gathering, studying, and using evidence, and by focusing on small seemingly unimportant
    details, mortality and complication rates can decline steadily in everything
    from battlefield injuries, to children suffering from cystic fibrosis, to
    halting the spread of polio. It is a
    compelling read, and has many implications for what it takes to be a great manager,
    not just what it takes to keep improving the quality of medical care throughout
    the world. I was especially struck how
    the best doctors and hospitals have what Jeff Pfeffer and I have called “the attitude
    of wisdom,” they have courage to keep acting on the best knowledge that they
    have right now and the humility to doubt what they know, so that when new
    information comes along, they can change their beliefs about what works –and
    their behavior too.

    I
    was also taken with Gawande’s suggestion that, if a hospital or medical unit
    wants to improve its performance, one of the most effective ways is to study “positive
    deviants,” those statistical outliers that are doing far better than the
    rest. As I read his stories, especially
    about the best versus the average hospitals that treat cystic fibrosis, I was taken with the approach. At the same
    time, I realized that it is remarkably similar to what many companies do when
    they benchmark: they find the very best performers in their industry – or another
    industry – and then try to imitate everything they do as closely as
    possible. This method can be useful, but
    at the same time, as our work on
    evidence-based management     shows, it is a risky method if done in a casual
    way, without thinking about what you are imitating and why.

    If
    you are going to try to learn from top performers, there are at least five
    pitfalls you need to keep in mind:

    1. What seem like characteristics
    of top performers may actually not distinguish them at all from poor performers     –Don’t just look at
    winners, look at winners and losers. This was the main flaw with Peters and
    Waterman’s huge best-seller In
    Search of Excellence    .     They only looked at excellent companies, so it
    was impossible to tell if what the winners were doing was any different from the
    losers!

    Bain_3

     2. Watch the correlation is not causation
    problem.     Everyone learns this in statistics, but a lot of leaders forget it
    when they benchmark. Just because something
    is associated with performance, doesn’t mean it causes performance. For an enduring example that seems to persist
    despite our complaints in the Harvard
    Business Review     (as well as directly to Bain partners), go to www.bain.com. The very first thing you see is chart the says “Our Client’s Outperform
    the Market 4 to 1.” I remain amazed that
    the smart people at Bain have had this on their website for so many years. Do they really mean to imply that using Bain
    has a huge positive wallop? They have
    some bold sounding and meaningless text beneath the chart (e.g., “Companies
    that outperform the market like to work with us; we are as passionate about their
    results as they are.”). The marketing people seem smart enough to duck
    the question of if using Bain really drives these results, because they are
    smart enough to know there are so many alternative explanations (e.g., perhaps firm that make more money can better afford an expensive management consultant).  But they aren’t wise enough to take the chart down — I suspect it is one of those sacred cows, something that many people realize is dumb, but are afraid to change.   I also want to emphasize that I am a big fan of Bain, in part,
    because I think they are among the most evidence-based of the major consulting
    firms, but again, I urge them to take this down – it makes them look bad. 

    3. When you compare winners
    and losers, beware of “untested” differences.      Just
    because every winner you look at does something and every loser you look at doesn’t
    do it, isn’t enough – it may just be the result of a bad sample. This is the one of the main problems with Jim
    Collins’ best-seller Good
    to Great.     I find this a compelling read and would like
    to think, for example, that firms with level 5 leaders, those who are unselfish and
    relentlessly driven to improve firm performance, will trump firms with
    selfish and less driven leaders. But note that Collins reaches this conclusion
    by comparing his 11 “great” firms to an equally small matched sample of firms
    that didn’t make the leap. He fails to
    point out that no attempt was made to find firms that also had level 5 leaders, but
    failed to make the leap –- and he could have left out thousands of firms from this tiny sample that had level 5 leaders, but didn’t make the leap. Again, I like a lot of things
    about this book, but I do wish that Collins wouldn’t hold it up as up as such a
    rigorous study, as while I think it has helped a lot companies, it is not a model of a rigorous research, and could only be published in a peer reviewed journal if it made careful links to the prior research that supports his conclusions (something the book doesn’t do) and if he acknowledged the numerous methodological flaws. See The Halo
    Effect     for a more damning attack. I am not as negative about Good
    to Great    , as I think it has helped many managers despite the excessive
    claims Collins makes about the research.  But the well-crafted critique in The Halo Effect is
    worth reading and, frankly, I wish Collins would acknowledge some of these problems.  It would still be a great book — everything has flaws and few books are as compelling as Good to Great. Also, admitting the flaws strikes me as something a level 5 leader would do! 

    4. What is good for them might be bad for
    you     Consider the case of a quality movement. If General Motors had not
    massively improved the quality of its cars ands trucks (despite its other persisting
    problems), I believe that the company would simply no longer be alive
    today. Yes, Toyota     continues to be a very tough
    competitor, and GM struggles, but their quality has improved massively in the
    past decade, and without it, the company would be in far worse shape – if not
    out of business. BUT that doesn’t mean
    that every company needs a quality movement. Kodak, for example, had a fairly effective quality effort some years
    back, but the problem was that it was focused on their soon-to-be obsolete chemical-based film business –so it helped them to be more efficient at doing the wrong.

    5. Winners may succeed
    despite rather because of some practices.     This brings me to my favorite example. It
    is very well-documented that Herb Kelleher, who was CEO of Southwest Airlines
    during an unprecedented run of growth and profitability in the industry, smoked
    a lot of cigarettes and (according to multiple reports, including his own)
    drank about a quart of Wild Turkey whiskey per day during this period. If mindless imitation of successful companies
    is the key to success, this means that you need to get your CEO to start
    smoking and drinking a lot – or to keep it up if he or she is already doing it.
    Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But it is no different than the arguments that
    armies of consultants are making right now about GE, Google, and P&G – you should
    do it because they do it, and are successful.

    In
    closing, I want to emphasize that you can learn a lot from “positive deviants.”  But you need to stop and think carefully about why they succeed and what work for your organization. And, consistent with the argument I make
    again and again here and elsewhere — following from design thinking —  if you are going to do something new, try a small some cheap
    experiments if you possibly can: It is a lot cheaper than rolling out a big
    program that turns out to be a bad idea. That is also why, although some mergers are a good idea, it is one of
    the organizational changes that I see as most risky because it so difficult to reverse once it is started.  Also, as I’ve written
    here before,     mergers have high failure rates, despite the success stories
    you may hear from your local investment banker.

  • Wolfowitz Tirade: Was He a Flaming Asshole?

    Paul
    Paul Wolfowitz has been shown the door at The World Bank. But there is one interesting angle to the story that I had missed until Lilly (in England) pointed out there were stories (at least in the UK papers) about Mr. Wolfowitz’s expletive-laced reaction to the investigation about his involvement with his girlfriend Shaha Riza’s transfer and pay raise.

    The Guardian ran a story — apparently based on an internal investigation conducted at the World Bank about Mr. Wolfowitz’s behavior — that reported:

    Sounding more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international
    leader, in testimony by one key witness Mr Wolfowitz declares: "If they
    fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too."

    The Guardian reported that "The angry comments attributed to Mr Wolfowitz came from damning
    testimony by Xavier Coll, head of human resources at the bank, who
    provided investigators with his notes of a meeting with Mr Wolfowitz
    last year."

    I always take press reports  — especially those likely based on leaks from political enemies — with a grain of salt.  But if this report is accurate, it may help explain why (in addition to political differences) the staff of the World Bank was so eager to send Wolfowitz packing. He sounds like a flaming asshole, and other elements of the story suggest (again, if they are accurate), that he showed some of the classic dysfunctions that people in power suffer from, which I’ve discussed here before, and are so well-documented in academic research:

    1. He was focused on satisfying his own needs — in this case, his girlfriend’s needs.

    2. He was oblivious to (or didn’t care about) his underlings reactions and opinions.

    3. He acted like the rules didn’t apply to him — Guardian quotes the report as saying ""Mr Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply."

     

  • Applying the Rule at the Highest Level

    Believerjerk_2

    I have written about how one of the most surprising — at least to me — reactions to The No Asshole Rule has been the small, but vehement, group of religious folks who have endorsed the book.  Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology has been especially supportive, first writing a post about how he read from The No Asshole Rule in a bible studies class to make the point that the book’s main message was quite similar to the famous 1 Corinthians passage.

    Richard ends the post as follows:

    So, we reflected on all this in my Sunday School class.  And after reflection on the No Asshole Rule, I read these famous words:

    Love
    is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is
    not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily
    angered, it keeps no record of wrongs…

    Basically, don’t be an asshole.

    I was most interested to see that Richard’s post generated 8 other quite supportive comments, many applauding him for his open-mindedness (I agree heartily). And comments on Richard’s follow-up post suggest that he inspired at least one other person to raise the rule in a bible studies class.

    I also had some interesting exchanges with a Presbyterian minister who thanked me for writing the book and reported that, although he didn’t quite think it was appropriate to discuss in a sermon, the problem of "jerks" plagued every congregation that he had worked with, and that he was having one-on-one conversations with people about the book, and its implications for running the church.

    In that spirit, someone sent me the above Bizarro cartoon, which shows the "delete button" being pushed at the gates of heaven.  The message seems to be that being a believer isn’t enough.

  • Take the Flying ARSE Test

    Flyingarse
    Are
    you one of those jerks who make air travel miserable for the rest of us? Or have you suffered through a recent flight
    with an unusually rude and self-absorbed passenger?  If so, take my new 24-item test at www.flyingarse.com –  do it with yourself or
    another passenger in mind.  It is finally
    ready – and check-out the silly donkey with the little wings, our official
    flying arse mascot.

    Diego
    over at Metacool has already taken
    the test     . As I would expect, he is
    a pretty civilized passenger. He scored a “3” out of 24, very low (I scored a “4”).
    I also have a more detailed
    pos    t on the test at my Harvard Online blog, The Working Life.

    I want
    to thank Sally Baron, Marina Park, a certain unnamed pilot for a major airline,
    and newlywed Brienne Zimmer at Electric Pulp
    for all their help with the test.  I also
    want to thank everyone who sent me suggestions about items to include in the
    Flying ARSE and for telling me so many frightening and funny stories about outrageous
    passenger behavior — see my earlier post on
    Airline Arseholes     for some crazy stories (the worst is Marissa’s story
    about the “tuna fish groper”). 

    Please
    let me know what you think of the test, suggest some additional items, and keep
    the stories coming.

    P.S. The original ARSE, the Asshole Rating
    Self-Exam, keeps going strong, with about a 1000 people a week still completing
    it – we are now at over 85,000 completions.

     

  • Camel Racing in the UAE

    Robot_camelrace
    I will eventually write a report about our adventures teaching an innovation class to executives and entrepreneurs in the United Arab Emirates last week, but for now, I thought I would tell you about the camel races.  Yousif AlYousif, our student and charming host (he took us out to smoke water pipes — honest,  it was just tobacco), sent me a couple pictures of camel races. Note that the "jockeys" in the top picture are actually remote controlled robots, developed because too many riders — who are just about always children (see bottom picture) — were getting injured and killed. 

    Camel_racing

  • Say It Isn’t So: My Adventure with the Cheating Scandals

    That is what Jeff Pfeffer’s email said this morning — he wanted to know if it was true, if I was encouraging students to cheat.  By the time he sent the note, my misadventure with the press — BusinessWeek — was pretty much over.  Or at least I hope it is over. Things looked pretty bad yesterday morning for a couple hours,  It all started when I got an email from a BusinessWeek reader that was titled "Cheating is Not Virtuous," which took me to task for my quote in the current BusinessWeek (where I was talking about d.school teaching), which was printed originally as "If you found somebody to help you write an exam, in our view that’s a sign of
    an inventive person who gets stuff done." 

    Both Jeff Pfeffer and the anonymous BusinessWeek reader were outraged by my apparent encouragement for cheating. And I don’t blame them, based on the words that were printed. This was not the message that I meant to convey to the reporter and I suspect that I didn’t say that sentence as we don’t have traditional exams at the d.school, mostly group projects. (The reporter, Michelle Conlin, says she checked her notes and
    that I did in fact say that but obviously we had some miscommunication)

    BUT regardless of exactly what happened, I am pleased to say that within an hour of getting the email from the outraged BusinessWeek reader, and then communicating it to the writer Michelle Conlin, they had changed the online version of story , which now says (I include the paragraph to give you context:

    The Stanford
    University Design School, for example, is so collaborative that "it
    would be impossible to cheat," says D-school professor Robert I.
    Sutton. "If you found somebody to help you write a group project, in
    our view that’s a sign of an inventive team member who gets stuff done.
    If you found someone to do work for free who was committed to open
    source, we’d say, ‘Wow, that was smart.’ One group of students got the
    police to help them with a school project to build a roundabout where
    there were a lot of bike accidents. Is that cheating?"

    In addition, BusinessWeek committed to printing a correction in a forthcoming print version of the magazine, which will read In
    “Cheating—Or Postmodern Learning?” Stanford Design School Professor Robert
    Sutton’s quote should have made clear that the d-school does not have individual
    exams. Grades are based on work in groups and students’ ability to mobilize
    outside networks."

    This is a cautionary tale, albeit one with an apparently happy ending.  It all started with a most interesting interview that I had with Michelle a couple weeks back, just as the cheating scandal at the Duke Business School was hitting the news: 34 MBA’s were busted for cheating.  I made clear to Michelle that in my more traditional classes, like Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach, where we give students individual exams and grade them on individual performance, that we do watch closely for cheating and have had issues. BUT the point I was trying to make was many d.school classes offer a different kind of education, where students work in groups, present solutions aimed at solving real problems, and those solutions often involve building and mobilizing networks of people out in the real world to help them identify and implement solutions.

    In this world — which reflects the reality of how people actually do work in modern organizations — traditional cheating is impossible, or a lot harder, because we encourage groups to critique and build on each other’s solutions, and solutions and prototypes are developed through a social process that involves experts, coaches, employees, customers, users, and many others.  So, for example:

    1. The student group that developed firefoxies.com lacked the computer programming expertise that they needed to put up their site, but were able to succeed because they found eager members of the open source community who wrote code from them for free. I don’t think this cheating, as we graded the students on their ability to find and activate social networks.  This is how things get done in a connected world. 

    2. As the article suggests, a group in another class that did a bike safety project built a roundabout at one of the most dangerous parts of the campus — and they had students using it for a few hours (a real working prototype…. now that is design thinking).  The Stanford police helped them by identifying the dangerous area, gave them permission to install it, and physically helped them build the roundabout. In addition, the students on bikes who used the roundabout "helped" them as well, as did another group of students who came along with safety signs and pamphlets, who joined in the effort in the spot — so it became the blended efforts of two teams. See the Stanford Daily story about the class.

    3. Our students who did a project for Wal-Mart on the sustainability initiative (see this post — you can even watch the student presentations if you want) recruited Wal-Mart employees and customers to help them in hundreds of ways — as well as their friends and fellow students. This project was about mobilizing excitement and support for the sustainability movement, and presenting the results to Wal-Mart, so the traditional individual exam model doesn’t apply here either.

    Yet, somehow, the quote in BusinessWeek seemed to imply that we were encouraging individual cheating, when in fact, our collective and network-based model means that "helping" isn’t cheating — it is what effective groups do.  There might be some forms of cheating in the d.school (I haven’t seen it yet, anything is possible), but in this world, the "bad behaviors" we worry about are being an uncooperative or lazy team member, not helping other teams, or not giving people who help your team enough credit.  To illustrate, I became extremely unhappy with one student who told me that he couldn’t attend class very much and was missing a lot of team meetings because he was so busy with his Rhodes and Marshall Scholarship interviews, and his Google job interviews.  His team was unhappy with him, and I pressured him (successfully) to drop the class.  I don’t know if his behavior is unethical, but I do know he was being a bad citizen.  That is the kind of behavior we focus on stopping, not cheating in the traditional sense.

    In short, my view of ethics or cheating hasn’t changed, but what is "cheating" in a class that tests pure individual performance is different than in a purely collaborative class that has no exams or individual assignments.  These facts were somehow obscured in the original BusinessWeek article, but I am glad they fixed it.   Returning to my little press fiasco, I take away four things from this experience:

    1. Don’t believe everything you read and hear in the media — we all know that, but it is easy to forget.

    2. No matter how careful that you think you are with the facts during media interviews, there is always the possibility of factual error and distortion. Try to be careful with you own facts, and ask the reporter during the interview if it is being recorded or if they are taking notes — so if something goes wrong, you have an idea of how to verify what you said.  (In most U.S. states, by the way, they have to tell you if they are tape-recording the conversation, or they are breaking the law).  In my case, I talk fast, and the reporter was taking notes rather than recording, so that increased the risk of distortion.

    3. If you disagree with the facts or emphasis of a story, don’t start out by assuming that people in the media have dark motives. Getting angry and make accusations will only make things worse.  My experience is that most journalists want to get the facts right and don’t want to twist them either.  But they write under deadline pressure, try to tell stories that weave together diverse sources, and also face pressures from editors and others to write in certain ways. I don’t know exactly what happened with this BusinessWeek story, but after making some mistakes in my career, I now try to avoid playing the blame  game if I can (e.g., I once called-up a Wall Street Journal reporter and yelled at her about 15 years ago… not a wise move even though I still think the facts were twisted unfairly). In this case, I started by assuming that I could have said the sentence about exams OR that it could have been something that journalist mis-recorded, but that it didn’t really matter whose "fault" it was.  Rather than getting into finger-pointing, my goal was to get the facts corrected.  I assumed that both Michelle and I are competent and well-meaning people, but as human-beings, we sometimes will make mistakes, and fixing the mistake (rather than blamestorming, as our politicians love to do) was what mattered.  Michelle was operating under the same assumptions, so it was a delight to work with her on the correction.

    4. Finally, as I have written here before about some problems I had with Amazon (and in my books), one of the best tests of people or organizations is "what happens when they make a mistake."  Humans and human organizations will make mistakes — after all,  learning and innovation is impossible without error, and we all slip-up now and then.  The real test is after the mistake, does learning occur?  Is it fixed quickly?  Or is the focus on avoiding the finger of blame and looking for a scapegoat?  It may sound odd, but the experience with Michelle and BusinessWeek yesterday was one of the best experiences I have ever had with the media, even though it could have been the worst.  We all just focused on fixing the problem, and to BusinessWeek’s credit, the entire focus was on repairing the possible inaccuracies as quickly as possible. I believe that the lack of blame and anger on both sides is one of the main reasons that this problem could be dealt with and repaired so quickly. 

    Sure, I could be vindicative and angry and claim that there are still magazines out there that make it sound like I am pro-cheating.  But what is the point?  I can’t see any upside.  The only way to avoid this kind of problem for certain is to never talk to the press. The only way to avoid writing things that are wrong is to never write anything at all.  I much prefer to be around people who do a lot of stuff, make mistakes now and then, quickly admit their errors, and then learn something — and even better — use their experience to teach others.   Indeed, in the end my opinion of Michelle and BusinessWeek is higher now than when this adventure started, and as strange as it sounds, I am glad it happened.  Indeed, I think that this is a lesson I learned from hanging around design thinkers like David Kelley, Perry Klebahn, and Diego Rodriguez.

    P.S. Jeff Pfeffer wrote a rather scathing Business 2.0 Column about cheating in business schools a couple years ago. You might want to read Teaching the Wrong Lesson.  Jeff gets into the topic in more detail deeper in his forthcoming book What Were They Thinking?

  • The Marine and the Bully from the Private Sector

    I just received this email this morning, a note from a U.S. Marine officer who said some nice things about The No Asshole Rule.  I am opposed to violence or threats of violence.  At the same time, I confess that couldn’t help sympathizing with the Marine who sent me this story.  The No Asshole Rule talks about how, when you face an overbearing asshole, there are times when intimidation and power games are the only way to protect yourself and your organization.  Pulling out a gun and threatening to hurt someone are desperate actions, and this Marine is not proud of what he did, but at the same time, he was in desperate straights and was committed to doing what was best for his fellow Marines. Read the story and let me know what you think.

    Here is his story, unedited (except for a couple typos):

    I’m reminded of a story of
    my own which I’d like to share with you. I was part of a special project for
    the Marine Corps. I was in a leadership role actively playing a part in the
    physical military operations and the academic/management part ruled by civilian
    contractors. Because of my education, I was tasked to play a liaison role which
    often meant bearing ill will from both parties as I tried to explain their
    intentions to the others. Right off the bat, a member of the civilian
    management team rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn’t sure what it was until he
    severely berated one of my senior Marines, telling him at one point that
    "we had all taken a oath to defend this Nation." I was offended by
    that. I knew for a fact he took no such oath. But more importantly, I believed
    that he was acting in a manner in which he thought was consistent with military
    leadership– an assumption he developed from watching too many movies.

    I held my tongue at the moment but that
    evening during our After Action Review, I brought the issue up. We were seated
    across from each other at a conference table. As soon as I aired my complaints,
    he puffed up in his chair, put both hands on the table and started looking at
    me menacingly. He was a large man– about six and a half feet and easily 250
    pounds. At that moment, I realized that he was trying to physically intimidate
    me. I’m much smaller– about 5’10" and 190 pounds. I could tell that this
    was a natural reaction to him and he did this often. For a moment I was amused.
    When he continued to glare at me, I finally drew my sidearm, placed it on the table and
    said to him, "Calm down. I deal in real violence." He settled down
    and walked out of the office a couple of minutes later. I hoped that this
    encounter would shift his behavior but it didn’t. He was a senior member of the
    team and he started treating everybody else worse. Me– he mostly left alone. I
    think I made my life better but I sure didn’t do anything to make my teammates
    lives easier.  Eventually, the most senior member of the civilian team
    removed him but not before I threatened to "accidentally" hurt him in
    training. I’m not proud I had to resort to that.

    This was my first contact
    with the civilian management world and I was not impressed. Unfortunately, my
    experiences after haven’t been much better. We certainly have our share of
    lousy leaders in the military world but I was surprised to see how much
    backstabbing and political in-fighting existed in civilian leadership circl    e.

    Like other aspects of organization life, dealing with assholes is a tough thing to do, and morality and ethics aren’t always defined by a clean and beautiful line that separates right from wrong.  I have mixed and complex reactions to this story. Part of me wants to say "this is wrong, guns and physical threats are always wrong."  But the other part says "This Marine was in a bad spot, and took the only effective course of action available to him."  I would appreciate other opinions, as this one has me troubled.

  • Brazil Calls It “Chega de Babaquice!”

    Melissa Chinchillo from Fletcher & Parry LLC (my literary agent) wrote me with some good news about the Brazilian title for The No Asshole Rule. She reports:  "Campus in Brazil will publish NAR at the end of
    May under the title Chega de Babaquice!"      Alas, my initial understanding was that this meant no more assholeness, or something like that, but apparently it means something much milder, like "no more silliness." 

    Melissa also sent me a round-up of the countries and publishers for The No Asshole Rule will be published — as  she says, there are only a few small markets left unsold like Indonesia, Thailand, Poland
    Poland, Romania, Hungary:

    UK – Warner  (published
    under "Sphere". distributes to countries including Ireland, South Africa,
    Australia, New Zealand, India, And Singapore)

    Germany – Hanser

    France – Vuibert/Albin Michel                                              

    Italy
    – Elliot Edizione                                       

    Spain – Gestion 2000/Planeta                                             

    Netherlands
    – Scriptum

    Brazil – Campus

    Portugal
    – Actual Editora                                               

    Japan 
    – Kodansha                                              

    Denmark –
    Huset Forlag                                               

    Korea 
    – Theory and Praxis                                              

    China –   China Remin University Press 

    Turkey
    – Remzi                                    

    Russia
    – Callidus                                              

    Taiwan
    – Locus    

    It has also been interesting dealing with press from all over the world; journalists in Australia, Ireland, and Brazil seem especially excited about the book lately. And as I reported earlier, some of the most amusing "language problems" occurred with the English press, notably the interview with the BBC "presenter" who was perfectly comfortable with me saying "asshole," but not let me say "ARSE" as it would offend her audience.  I have learned that the opposite tactic works in the U.S.; I have never got in trouble for saying "arse" on American radio.

    P.S. For French readers, a long article (with a couple of sidebars) on Objectif Zéro-Sale-Con just came out in 01men magazine.

  • 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

    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.

     

  • Zingerman’s: A Civilized Workplace

    Zings1_2
    Today’s New York Times business section had a front page article about Zingerman’s, called A Corner Deli With International Appeal. I have fond memories of Zingerman’s, as it opened when I was a doctoral student in Organizational Psychology at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor Michigan back in the early 1980’s.  I thought it was one the greatest places I had ever been, with fantastic sandwiches, delicacies from all over the world, and a great staff.  But I hadn’t followed it very closely over the years.

    I do recall that, even in the early days, The New York Times called it the greatest deli outside of New York City.  But until I read the article and did a bit more homework, I hadn’t realized that this little deli –which still exists in an unassuming part of town — was now part of a 30 million dollar a year business with over 500 employees.  Founder’s Paul Saginaw and Ari Wienzweig remain the owners and remain dedicated to quality ingredients of all kinds, and expanded to other areas including a brisk mail order business and other areas including their own brand of coffee.  Now they are world renowned for their quality foods, and many people trek to Ann Arbor to visit the deli rather than The University of Michigan. That little deli now brings in about 10 million a year.  Even though it it is still almost impossible to park nearby, the deli remains the emotional and financial heart of the business. What I was most taken with, however, is that that Saginaw and Wienzweig have grown this business by focusing in the quality of their products and service, and on treating their employees very well, and treating profit as a secondary goal.   

    They share their financial results with everyone, including in the newsletter for customers.  They make modest margins because they buy expensive ingredients and treat their suppliers fairly, are so devoted to quality in other ways, and give so much back to their employees (the return this year on their deli’s 10 million was 5% and, on the mail order business’s 8 million, was 3.5%). As the Times reports:

    Along with hourly wages, vacation time (as much as six weeks after
    20 years), health and dental care and food discounts, full-time
    employees receive “gain sharing,” which pays out if their part of the
    company exceeds its annual business plan……The
    structure also helps explain why margins remain low even as revenue has
    risen. To pay employees, support local producers and contribute to the
    community, “a big piece of it is charging enough money,” Mr. Weinzweig
    said    .

    After living in Silicon Valley so long, where there is so much greed, and just about everyone seems focused on squeezing every cent of everyone around them — employees, customers, suppliers — Zingerman’s is a refreshing reminder that financial greed isn’t always the first priority for every owner and manager.  It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s poem Joe Heller, which as I have written here before, Vonnegut allowed me to reprint in The No Asshole Rule.   Paul Saginaw and Ari Wienzweig seem to believe, like Joe Heller (the author of Catch 22) did, that they have enough, and that using their talents to create something beautiful and to give back along the way is a better thing than maximizing their personal wealth at every turn. Indeed, the article ends with two great points from the founders:

    But Mr. Saginaw said profit, in itself, was not Zingerman’s
    motivation. “We’ve had dozens and dozens of opportunities to franchise,
    sell the name, take the check and walk away,” Mr. Saginaw said.

    Instead,
    Mr. Weinzweig said, the idea was to create a special experience. “Our
    goal in 2020 is to leave our world better than it was when we came
    here,” he said.

    P.S. In addition to The New York Times article, check out this INC article on Zingerman’s, called The Coolest Small Company in America