I got a nice note from Jim Brown about his Nuggets for the Noggin site; I was taken by the practical management wisdom, as well as the practical reason Jim started this adventure:
Nuggets for the Noggin was originally created to cover training
topics for the Keller Williams Realty Slidell associates. It was my
belief that a great many real estate associates are very busy and as
such do not have the time to sit in training classes that can last up
to 3 to 6 hours long.
I am still sometimes surprised by how strong the emotional reactions are to The No Asshole Rule; the sad, funny, and scary emails keep coming in from around the world (a really awful tale came in this morning from a former victim in the Australian Department of Defense). I am especially struck by the reactions I have been getting from members of the media –who are usually pretty tight-lipped. The interviews that I’ve done in the past — for my other prior three books and for other things, like the the Stanford d.school — are often engaging, but rarely contain what feel like "Dr. Phil moments," where the person interviewing me reverses roles and starts telling me his or her stories about dealing with assholes in the workplace — and sometimes ask for my advice.
Something like this seems to happen in about 50% of the interviews I’ve done lately, even among the most experienced journalists. Experienced journalists have heard a lot of stuff, so I listen and learn.
Just last week, I got a great tip during an interview (I will not name the source to protect the innocent and guilty). We were talking about the problem of asshole poisoning being a contagious disease that you catch from and give to other people, and how sometimes the worst episodes happen during escalating email wars and phone calls, where anger is tossed back and forth between the warring parties. The journalist I was talking to had a great suggestion about how to break such a cycle when you are on a nasty phone call: HANG UP WHILE YOU ARE SPEAKING. And do it without warning.
Think about it. If you hang up while the other person is speaking, it is an insult that fuels the flames. If you hang up while you are speaking, there is a break in the action, and confusion… perhaps the line just went dead? And in any case interrupting yourself is just not as hostile an act as interrupting someone else. I guess it is a little sneaky, but it strikes me as an interesting and at times wise tactic that is the lesser of other evils — like screaming an insult, pausing, waiting for the other person to answer back, and then slamming the phone down as they respond (or pressing the "end call" button).
The other sign that journalists are emotionally drawn to the problem of assholes is that several have told me that they became interested in doing a story because they work for — or have worked for — an asshole in the business. I had an experience about two weeks ago where a journalist for Europe interviewed me (and seemed oddly tense during the interview, I was worried that I was offending him in some way). After the interview was done, he wrote me an email about the asshole boss he worked for and asked for advice about what to do. I am not a professional therapist and warned him that he likely needed more skilled help. But I did make my usual top suggestion: If you are stuck with an asshole or a bunch of them, the best thing to do is to get out as fast as you can.
P.S. The other funny twist is that media people keep asking for a second copy of the book because their copy has been been stolen. This seems to be a San Francisco phenomenon in particular: It happened when Jessica Guynn was doing her San Francisco Chronicle story and I just got a note from Moira Gunn of Tech Nation (who wrote to tell me that our interview runs tonight on her syndicated PBS show), reporting that someone at her radio station KQED had stolen her book. (It looks like you can find the interview with Moira on The No Asshole Rule and download a podcast of it here.)
I take all this theivery this as a good sign! It all reminds me of the old hippie bible Steal this Book by Abbie Hoffman.
Stanford Business School’s Jeff Pfeffer and I published a book last year called Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence Based Management. We made the case that using evidence-based practices in organizations was not only possible, but that some of the most the most effective leaders and organizations were already doing it. I am pleased to report that Jeff testified to congress this week about the implications of evidence principles for on March 8th the Hearing on Federal Personnel Reform. You can read Jeff’s full testimony at our website, www.evidence-basedmanagement.com, where it is the featured article. I am biased of course, but I think that Jeff does a great job of explaining what evidence-based management is and zeros in on the challenges of implementing pay-for-performance systems (which the Federal government is currently experimenting with and proposing to spread throughout the system). He explains how — although many private sector companies and their consultants have great faith in individual pay-for-performance schemes — these systems are typically less effective and have more negative side-effects than is commonly believed.
P.S. Also check out Joe Mello’s guest column on The Myth of the Mean. Joe is COO of DaVita, one of the companies that we feature as a model of how to turn evidence-based management practices into action. DaVita runs hundreds of kidney dialysis centers and is the industry leader in both quality of patient care and financial performance.
I’ve been working with Sally Haldorson and the gang at 800ceoread.com to develop a new Changethis manifesto. Sally edits and publishes four or five of these high-graphics articles a month. This is my second manifesto; my first was Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap? This month, the other manifestos are Lonely Planet: How Relationships Suffer and Why It Matters by Elizabeth Johnson,
Frontline Leadership: A Cycle of Engagement Manifesto by Mark Graban, 100 Ways to Kill a Concept: Why Most Ideas Get Shot Down by Michael Iva, The Silent Revolution: Peter Drucker’s Voice Still Resonates by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, and
How Toyota Can Save Your Life…At the Hospital by Mark Graban. As with everything that 1800CEOread does, they are committed to quality and are some of the most delightful people you can work with.
My new Changethis essay, as the picture shows, is about The Upside of Assholes — you can go to the web page where this a link to this pdf document or load it directly. I write about this topic grudgingly in this manifesto, as I do in the book in book at greater length. My co-author, Jeff Pfeffer, seems to be especially enamored of this argument (although he is rarely an asshole). My reply to him, and to others who make arguments about the virtues of assholes, is that, yes, there are times and places when they get ahead, but the damage that they leave behind is often far greater than they and others realize, and most important, if you are a winner and asshole, you are still an asshole and I don’t want to get near you!
Last year, Diego Rodriguez and I led a new Stanford d.school class called Creating Infectious Action. We recruited 26 master’s students from around Stanford — mostly engineers, product designers, and MBA’s, but doctoral student in philosophy too — and worked with companies and industry experts to spread Firefox. promote hip-hop performers, and too spread financially prudent behavior among young adults. This year, I am playing a much smaller role, and Diego and two of our team coaches from last (who are both now Associate Consulting Professors), Debra Dunn and Michael Dearing have taken charge of a descendant of this class called Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB). They have also recruited Kris Woyzbun (a product design student and veteran of at least 4 design school classes) to be the course assistant and Perry Klebahn (now CEO of Timbuk2, and a master product designer and team leader) to be a team coach.
If you are are a Stanford master’s student in any field, I encourage you to sign-up for this class, it is a lot of work, but you will learn a huge amount, and the teaching team has diverse skills and deep experience, and are great people. If you want to read a great testimonial, see Min Liu’s post on why the d.school works. You can also see video from Alwayson where Diego and I talk about last year’s CIA class.
Here is the description for this year’s class:
Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB): application due March 9
This small and intense project-based class is built around two team
efforts to “spread” positive behavior, which will be bolstered by
exposure to, and coaching from, industry experts and academics. The
first project will be an initiative done with Mozilla, the second a
project focused on building the user base of a social venture called
Global Giving that runs an
online marketplace connecting donors with
social entrepreneurs globally. A limited number of summer internships
with Global Giving will be available to CIA-KGB students who wish to
continue creating infectious action in that domain.The teaching team behind CIA-KGB brings a wealth of academic and
real-world experience to the course. The instructors are Michael
Dearing, Debra Dunn, Diego Rodriguez, and Bob Sutton (who will be a
guest instructor). The course assistant is Kris Woyzbun, who was part
of the inaugural version of CIA last year. Project teams will also
benefit from the coaching of Timbuk2 CEO Perry Klebahn.Learning how to become a better design thinker will be a major focus
of this course. Students will apply the “build to think” philosophy of
the d.school and create prototypes of everything from viral marketing
campaigns to entire businesses. While there will substantial helpings
of theory delivered throughout the quarter, this is a course for people
who want to get their hands dirty, to get out in the world and do
things.
P.S. See Diego’s post on the CIA-KGB class for more information and context — and to catch his excitement about the class.
I was taken with the detailed and at times horrifying responses I got to my post on Airplane Arseholes — the very worst was from a woman who wrote about a tuna fish eating pervert. But the more mundane stuff — about people slamming their seats back or hollering into their cell phones — also generated a lot of emotion too, and indeed, airplanes are places where asshole poisoning sometimes runs wild. These responses were provoked by my plea for help with a little piece that I was writing for the ValueJet magazine. Frankly, I got so carried away with the assignment that I sent them a piece about three times longer than requested, and I haven’t heard back from them yet. I suggested a 12-Item self-test that passengers could take that I called the Flying ARSE — inspired by the original workplace Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE), which has now been completed by about 45,000 people and attracted over 70,000 unique visitors. They will likely trim it way down or might decline to publish it, but I am happy the outcome in any case.
All this has further inspired me to develop a full-length Flying ARSE test, an asshole self-test for airplane passengers. Right now, to allow some rough comparison with workplace ARSE levels, I planning on also making it a 24 -item test — although that may change. And I am starting to talk with people from Electric Pulp about doing a web-based version like we did with Kawasaki. I hope to have this up and running a few weeks. The comments and emails I got yesterday gave me great ideas for items, but now I need to generate more questions, so please make suggestions. Your stories are wonderful (and horrible), but also don’t hesitate to suggest specific items.
As a bit of inspiration, I offer my favorite item in the current draft, which your stories inspired:
"You are skilled at multi-tasking – walking on the plane, dealing with your luggage, talking on your cell phone all at once. Sure, you sometimes stand in the aisle a little longer and
bump into people, but it is a good use of YOUR time."
P.S. Check out this New Yorker story called Turbulence by David Sedaris, one of my favorite storytellers and writers. It shows how asshole poisoning can spread on a plane, as usual with his writing, very funny.
I wrote a post earlier today about a weird review of The No Asshole Rule on Amazon that was not only hostile, but also seemed to be about another book. My book might have a dirty title, but does not say, for example, that "women are spare parts in the social repertoire —
mere optional extras" or that "all minorities are poor,
stupid ghetto trash." I asked people to send messages to Amazon that the reviews was inappropriate and I also got in touch with people at Amazon, who responded almost immediately. It was fixed within about 15 minutes. I want to thank all of you for your help! And I would also add that, although Amazon has a huge website, and things do go wrong at times, this is the second time I’ve dealt with a problem on The No Asshole Rule page, and both times, they have been incredibly responsive.
See my earlier post about Amazon and the Best Diagnostic Question. As I said then, the best single diagnostic I’ve ever found for indicating if an organization is innovative, cares about customers, and is good at implementation — and learning — is "what happens when they make a mistake?" This time, they didn’t even make a mistake, they just took down a review meant for another book.
As I said months ago, I wish that Amazon was running my cell phone company!
Thank you to everyone who helped!
P.S. Scott points out that the Amazon reveiwer, Lear, has a pretty crazy pattern of reviews, so this just may have been a random act on nastiness.
This is the title of Diane Stafford’s Work Space column, which appeared today in the Kansas City Star. Diane is singing my song, even if Mr. Befera of Palo Alto disagrees.
Alas, it seems you have to register to see the story, but it is free. Also, you can check out Diane’s Workspace blog, which has lots of great stuff — on everything from exit interviews to work lessons from the Oscars.
I am writing a short piece for the EasyJet In-Flight magazine. EasyJet is a very successful discount airline in the UK, sort of the Southwest of Europe. I am writing to hear from folks about the kinds of things that "Airline Arseholes" do, ideas I might use to develop a short version of the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE) for airline passengers. I thought of things like always taking both armrests, berating airline employees, talking loudly (especially on the cell phone), and jumping in the aisle to to knock people down to be first.
If you have ideas of items I can add to the Airline Arsehole list, I’d be delighted if you could make a comment or send me an email. Comments will be better for brainstorming, but I understand some people prefer to keep things less public.
The deadline is tomorrow! And then no doubt they will edit down, as always happens.
This post that sort of blends ideas
from Polly LaBarre’s suggestion that too much of the language that leaders use
in organizations is worn out biz-buzz, what she calls “jargon
monoxide” and a post a bit earlier quoting the government employee who,
along with her co-workers, maintained “asshole
diaries” about a nasty coworker that were apparently instrumental in her “mysterious”
departure from the workplace. I got a
note from a guy who works for a demeaning CEO, and he explained to me that he is
the curator for the careful records that he his colleagues are keeping of his
actions, which they call their “Doomsday Files” for “Napoleon Narcissus.” I think Polly
would approve of the eloquent language!