Category: Books

The Asshole Survival Guide: My Latest Book

The No Asshole Rule was published 10 years ago. It focused on building civilized workplaces. Yet the most frequent question that it provoked were variations of "Help. I am dealing with an asshole (or a bunch of them), what do I do?"

People asked it in some form or another in the most of the 8000 or so emails that I got about that book and in hundreds of casual conversations. I've been asked it by numerous of journalists (for both professional and personal reasons) and by critics of The No Asshole Rule who complained that the book devoted just one short chapter to addressing it. I've heard it from all kinds of people of all kinds including cashiers at Costco, Jewish Cantors and Catholic Priests, executive assistants, young lawyers who worked for nasty partners, old lawyers who worked with nasty clients, a CEO who felt oppressed by "boardholes" and "douche boards," airline customers and pilots, and on and on.

During the past decade, I took care to save the emails and other bits that people sent me about workplace jerks and other kinds of assholes. And I spent a few hours each week reading and cataloging the growing pile of academic research on all things asshole including abusive supervision, rudeness, "mobbing," abusive customers, negative emotions, air rage, and such. But it took me years to returned to writing about the asshole problem again.

I got distracted by writing two other books, other adventures such as the Designing Organizational Change Project at Stanford, and life in general. But the ten year anniversary The No Asshole Rule inspired me to devote much of 2016 to writing a book that gives the best answers I can muster to all those people who keep asking me that question. The Asshole Survival Guide was published in September 2017.

I am posting plug for my latest book on this old Work Matters blog, in part, as a kind of goodbye to the active life of this site. I may still post stuff here occasionally, but I am now using my new All Things Bob Sutton site as the main place where I post things and as the main first "stop" to find my work.

This post completes a cycle that was started back in in 2006 when Diego Rodriguez of IDEO and Metacool fame convinced me to give this new fangled blogging thing a try. Diego thought it would be a good way to create buzz for my forthcoming asshole book and he knew that I liked to write about leading and dealing with workplaces. Over the past few years, I haven't been blogging here much, and most stuff I have written has appeared on my LinkedIn Influencer pages, sometimes at Harvard Business Review and Medium, and at stray places such as INC and the McKinsey Quarterly.

Yet when I look at this site, I am amazed by how how many pieces I've posted here (many of which took a day or more to write), by the number, range, and quality of comments people have posted, by the wonderful lessons readers have taught me, and by all the connections I've made with people who reached out to me. My first real post (after deleting a couple of experiments) appeared on june 13th, 2006. It was called "Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal": I challenged a myth, or a least a severe oversimplification, that research proves brainstorming doesn't work. My Typepad dashboard shows that there are 1180 posts on this site ( I wrote all but one or two) and 5648 reader comments. The site has had almost 4 million pageviews (3868829) since it was launched and averages 975 views per day (I am sure many are bots!).

I am not shutting down this site. Rather, I am going to pretty it up a little bit over the next couple weeks and keep it as an archive, which will remain at www.bobsutton.org and at bobsutton.typepad.com – and I may update it in small ways now and then. The new book prompted me to think about how I want to bring together my varied past work, including the stuff on this blog, and to provide one stop shopping for my new stuff as well. So I just launched a new website called "All Things Bob Sutton" that is at bobsutton.net (which now directs you to the new site instead of this one). I worked with Liz Mortati,a great web designer who Adam Grant recommended to me. The new site contains links to my various stuff, including this site, and to various other posts and articles, videos, and quizzes like the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE). And it will be updated with new stuff I've got cooking.

I invite you to follow me to the new site. There will be a lot more action there this year than there has been at the Work Matters blog in a long time. And I especially want to thank everyone who has read this blog, made comments, spread the word about various posts, and written in me in recent years to nudge me to start posting here more often. I hope you like the new place.

April 17, 2017
12 Books That Every Leader Should Read: Updated

I have been maintaining – and occasionally updating — a list of “Books Every Leader Should Read” on this Work Matters blog since 2011. These are books that have taught me much about people, teams, and organizations — while at the same time — provide useful guidance (if sometimes indirectly) about what it takes to lead well versus badly. This is the latest update. I just updated the list over at LinkedIn and have included it here as well. I have expanded it to 12 books this year and, even with that, I left out many of my favorites – and probably many of yours as well. After all, some 11,000 business books are published in the United States every year.

Many on the list are research based, others tell detailed stories, and only two are quick reads (Orbiting the Giant Hairball and Parkinson’s Law). That reflects my bias. I lean toward books that have real substance beneath them. This runs counter to the belief in the business book world at the moment that people will only buy and read books that are very short and simple – and have just one idea. So, if your kind of business book is The One Minute Manager (which frankly, I like too… but you can read the whole thing in 20 or 30 minutes), then you probably won't like most of these books.

1. The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. A masterpiece of evidence-based management — the strongest argument I know that "the big things are the little things.

2. Influence by Robert Cialdini. The classic book about how to persuade people to do things, how to defend against persuasion attempts, and the underlying evidence. I have been using this in class at Stanford for over 25 years, and I have had dozens of students say to me years later "I don't remember much else about your class, but I still use and think about that Cialdini book."

3. Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. A modern masterpiece, already a classic after just a few years. How to design ideas that people will remember and act on. I still look at it a couple times a month and I buy two or three copies at a time because people are always borrowing it from me. I often tell them to keep it because they rarely give it back anyway. And, for my tastes, it has the best business book cover of all time — the duct tape even looks and feels real.

4. Thinking, Fast and Slow TDaniel Kahneman. Even though the guy won the Nobel Prize, this book is surprisingly readable. A book about how we humans really think, and although it isn't designed to do this, Kahneman also shows how and why so much of the stuff you read in the business press is crap.

5. Collaboration by Morten Hansen. He wrote a hot bestseller with Jim Collins, Great By Choice, which is OK, but this is a better and more important book. I have read it three times and, in my view, it is — by far — the best book ever written about what it takes to build an organization where people share information, cooperate, and help each other succeed.

6. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. It is hard to explain, sort of like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll, as the old song goes. But it is one of the two best creativity books ever written, and one of the best business books of any kind – even though it is nearly an anti-business book. Gordon's voice and love creativity and self-expression — and how to make it happen despite the obstacles that unwittingly heartless organizations put in the way — make this book a joy.

7. Creativity,Inc. by Ed Catmull. One of the best business/leadership/organization design books ever written – this and Hairball are a great pair. I wrote a more detailed review of Ed’s wonderful book here. As I wrote in my blurb, and this is no B.S., “This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: making films that make them feel proud of one another. I read this book from cover to cover again about a month ago – there is so much there as Ed brings in so much of his amazing life and gleans so many lessons about leadership and life I confess that I am biased about this book. I have met Ed several times and swayed by his modesty, smarts and how well he listens. The last time we met, Ed told me a great story. He and his editor were having trouble with the flow of the book. So he asked a couple of the Pixar script writers who worked on the film Monsters INC to read the draft and make suggestions. Ed said they spotted the problem right away and came up with a great solution. Ed has resources that other authors don’t! That beautiful cover is a Pixar design too.

8. Leading Teams by the late J. Richard Hackman. When it comes to the topic of groups or teams, there is Hackman and there is everyone else. If you want a light feel good romp that isn't very evidence-based, read The Wisdom of Teams. If want to know how teams really work and what it really takes to build, sustain, and lead them from a man who was immersed in the problem as a researcher, coach, consultant, and designer for over 40 years, this is the book for you. Oh, and if you want the cheat sheet – although you are missing enough that you are mostly cheating yourself — check out Hackman’s HBR piece, the very definition of profound simplicity, a lifetime of wisdom and (I am guessing) the results of 1000 studies summarized in six concise points.

9. Give and Take by Adam Grant. Adam is the hottest organizational researcher of his generation. When I read the pre-publication version, I was so blown away by how useful, important, and interesting that Give and Take was that I gave it one of the most enthusiastic blurbs of my life: “Give and Take just might be the most important book of this young century. As insightful and entertaining as Malcolm Gladwell at his best, this book has profound implications for how we manage our careers, deal with our friends and relatives, raise our children, and design our institutions. This gem is a joy to read, and it shatters the myth that greed is the path to success." In other words, Adam shows how and why you don't need to be a selfish asshole to succeed in this life. America — and the world — would be a better place if all of us memorized and applied Adam's worldview. I love this book — I give to Stanford students and executives all the time, especially when they worry aloud that, to get ahead, their only choice is to be a selfish asshole.

10. Parkinson’s Law by the late C. Northcote Parkinson. You’ve probably heard of Parkinson’s Law, which he first proposed in The Economist in 1955: “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” I had as well, but I never knew much about C. Northcote Parkinson, nor had I read his 1958 gem of the same name (I didn't even know it existed) until Huggy Rao and I started writing Scaling Up Excellence and my well read co-author pointed me to this collection of essays. Parkinson was quite a guy — a scholar of public administration, naval historian, and author of over 60 books. For our scaling book, I was especially taken with his arguments, evidence, and delightfully polite English sarcasm about the negative and predictable effects of group size and administrative bloat. I am also a big fan of The Peter Principle, which is similar in some ways, (I wrote the forward to the 40 Anniversary Edition – read it here) but Parkinson’s Law is an even better book.

11. To Sell is Human, By Dan Pink. You might ask, what does this have to do with management and leadership? Read the book. Dan does a masterful job of showing how, to lead and motivate others, to protect and enhance of the reputations of the people, teams, and organizations we care about, and to have successful careers as well, we all need to be able to sell people our ideas, products, solutions, and yes, ourselves. Dan’s ability as a storyteller is what makes this book stand above so many others — his stories are not only compelling, they make evidence-based principles come alive. To be honest, I had not devoted much attention to this book until my wife picked up a copy and read the whole thing from start to finish in about a day. She then spent the next week raving about all the ways Dan's book would help her as CEO of a non-profit – in everything from fundraising, to inspiring employees and volunteers, to dealing with the media, to convincing new prospects to join her organization’s board. Then I read it myself. As much as I admire Malcolm Gladwell, I believe that Dan Pink just might be the most skilled writer we have at translating behavioral science research. His stuff is so fun to read, it doesn't distort or exaggerate findings, and he does a masterful job of teaching us how to apply the lessons in his books.

12. The Path Between the Seas by historian David McCullough. On building the Panama Canal. This is a great story of how creativity happens at a really big scale. It is messy. Things go wrong. People get hurt. But they also triumph and do astounding things. I also like this book because it is the antidote to those who believe that great innovations all come from start-ups and little companies (although there are some wild examples of entrepreneurship in the story — especially the French guy who designs Panama's revolution — including a new flag and declaration of independence as I recall — from his suite in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and successfully sells the idea to Teddy Roosevelt). As my Stanford colleague Jim Adams points out, the Panama Canal, the Pyramids, and putting a man on moon are just a few examples of great human innovations that were led by governments. If you want to learn about what world class scaling “clusterfug” looks like, read about how the French messed things up – and if you want to learn about skilled scaling (with some horrible side-effects) and the amazing U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, find the time to read this rather massive masterpiece.

I almost added a 13th book: Work Rules by Google’s head of “People Operations” Laszlo Bock, which will published in April 2015. I am about two-thirds through an advance copy; it is a compelling and relentlessly useful guide to how Google selects, evaluates, motivates, and keep learning from its people. I especially love the chapters on “Don’t Trust Your Gut” and “It’s Not All Rainbows and Unicorns” (about Google’s biggest people management mistakes). Perhaps I will include it next year as I am captivated by Bock’s insights and spirited writing.

I would love to know of your favorites — and if want a systematic approach to this question, don't forget The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

P.S. For self-defense, I still recommend that we all read Isaacson's Steve Jobs – even though it has been a few years, I still keep going places — parties, family gatherings, talks I give and attend, and even the grocery store where people start talking about Jobs and especially arguing about him. As I explained in Wired and Good Boss, Bad Boss, I have come to believe that whatever Jobs was in life, in death he has become a Rorschach test — we all just project our beliefs and values on him. That said, Ed Catmull’s chapter on Jobs in Creativity INC. is one of the most compelling defenses of this controversial character I have read.

P.P.S. Also, a big thanks to Chris Fry, who has held senior positions at Salesforce.com and Twitter, and is one of the heroes in our book Scaling Up Excellence. Chris urges me to maintain this list – and for offers gentle complaints when I add something that he believes isn't as good as he had hoped. Chris’s favorite book on the list is Path Between the Seas.

December 17, 2014
Essentialism; It Will Make You Think and Might Even Make You Less Crazy

Greg McKeown's publisher sent me an advanced copy of his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. I said I would look at for a possible blurb (I don't do advanced praise for a lot of books, in part, because I now insist on reading the whole thing before I do — and it takes time). I was ready to NOT be impressed, as there are frankly lots of books out there about the power of simplicity. But Greg goes beyond what I have seen from any other book with a similar message (although I am a big fan of Matt May's The Laws of Subtraction as well, but that is a different book as it has many short essays, but still has a unified writing and great writing and editing — in fact Matt's book and Greg's would be a good pair to read together).

Through Greg's great message, his lovely spare writing style, and by gently leading the reader through his philosophy he shows you what it "disciplined" approach means, looks like, and how to "be it" not just know how to define it (I loved "the perks of being unavailable," "win big by cutting your losses," and " "select: the power of extreme criteria" in particular).

I was especially interested once I got into the book because one of the major themes of Scaling Up Excellence is that, as although much research shows that we we human beings get dumber, loss will powers, and do each task less well as cognitive load increases, the necessary practices, structures, and rituals that organizations use often make it difficult or impossible for people to perform well (especially as organizations and programs expand). We do touch on some simlar themes to Greg (we are both big advocates of sleep and taking breaks!), but we focus more on approaches for redesigning jobs, teams, and organizations, and our focus zeros in on scaling.

Essentialism is a quick and efficient read, as you would expect given the title, but you learn a lot, and there is something about the book that led me to believe that, despite my general inability to use the word "no" more often than I should for my own good, that this book will help. Although I couldn't quite resist reading the book, doing the blurb, and writing this little post!

My blurb:

“Essentialism is a powerful antidote to the current craziness that plagues our organizations and our lives. Read Greg McKeown’s words slowly, stop and think about how to apply them to your life – you will do less, do it better, and begin to feel the insanity start to slip away.”

December 8, 2013
Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants: Funny Title, Silly Cover, Seriously Well-Crafted Book

Several months back, Scott Berkun's publisher sent me an advanced copy of "The Year Without Pants" to read; it is a pretty silly title and as you can see, the cover is pretty wild too (I love it). Scott's last book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, was just splendid, so I thought I would take a look. I was hooked immediately, as Scott offers a compelling story of the year he spent at WordPress.com, a fast growing and wildly unconventional company where employees work from wherever they wish, there are few meetings and rules, and many of the conventional trappings are removed. At the same time, because Scott is such a compelling writer and so honest about things, he doesn't whitewash things, he describes the ups and downs and the tensions.

And if you read this book, you will also learn that some of the beliefs that people have about the future of work likely won't come true. Yes, people had enormous freedom and were massively creative — but at the same time — they couldn't escape the constraints of being in an organization.They still needed some hierarchy (Scott was a team leader and he had some bosses too), there were agreements about standard ways to do — and not do — things, and everyone wasn't always delighted with how things unfolded. His team was unusually functional and creative, the descriptions are wonderful, and the book also is filled with great pictures and other graphics that show the real people and the places they worked, and the kind of work they produced.

I read, or more accurately, start to read, several business books each week. Most aren't very good, to tell you the truth. This is the best book I have read since Adam Grant's Give and Take. If you read this book and Tracy Kidder's classic Soul of a New Machine, you can learn a lot about how work is changing (at least in some places), but also, about how it is still the same too. The technology certainly changes how and where we work, but we are still humans, we are social creatures, we strive for meaning and creativity, and we are all limited (and propelled) by our personal quirks and the attribuites of our species.

P.S. The Year Without Pants comes out in a few weeks, but I suggest that you preorder it, both because you will want it and because preorders will help this book get the attention it deserves. I am going to preorder my copy right now.

August 22, 2013
12 Books Every Leader Should Read:Updated

I first posted this in 2011, but I update it now and then. Note I have removed two from the list: Men and Women of the Corporatio n and Who Says that Elephants Can't Dance? They are both great books, but I am trying to stick to 12 books and the two new ones below edge them out. Here goes:

I was looking through the books on Amazon to find something that struck my fancy, and instead, I started thinking about the books that have taught me much about people, teams, and organizations — while at the same time — provide useful guidance (if sometimes only indirectly) about what it takes to lead well versus badly. The 12 books below are the result.

Most are research based, and none are a quick read (except for Orbiting the Giant Hairball). I guess this reflects my bias. I like books that have real substance beneath them. This runs counter the belief in the business book world at the moment that all books have to be both short and simple. So, if your kind of business book is The One Minute Manager (which frankly, I like too… but you can read the whole thing in 20 or 30 minutes), then you probably won't like most of these books at all.

1. The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. A masterpiece of evidence-based management — the strongest argument I know that "the big things are the little things."

2. Influence by Robert Cialdini the now classic book about how to persuade people to do things, how to defend against persuasion attempts, and the underlying evidence. I have been using this in class at Stanford for over 20 years, and I have had dozens of students say to me years later "I don't remember much else about the class, but I still use and think about that Cialdini book."

3.Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath. A modern masterpiece, the definition of an instant classic. How to design ideas that people will remember and act on. I still look at it a couple times a month and I buy two or three copies at a time because people are always borrowing it from me. I often tell them to keep it because they rarely give it back anyway.

4. Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman. Even though the guy won the Nobel Prize, this book is surprisingly readable. A book about how we humans really think, and although it isn't designed to do this, Kahneman also shows how much of the stuff you read in the business press is crap.

5. Collaboration by Morten Hansen. He has that hot bestseller now with Jim Collins called Great By Choice, which I need to read. This is a book I have read three times and is — by far — the best book ever written about what it takes to build an organization where people share information, cooperate, and help each other succeed.

6. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. It is hard to explain, sort of like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll as the old song goes. But it is the best creativity book ever written, possibly the business book related to business ever written. Gordon's voice and love creativity and self-expression — and how to make it happen despite the obstacles that unwittingly heartless organizations put in the way — make this book a joy.

7. The Pixar Touch by David Price. After reading this book, my main conclusion was that it seems impossible that Pixar exists. Read how Ed Catmull along with other amazing characters– after amazing setbacks, weird moments, and one strange twist after another — realized Ed's dream after working on it for decades. Ed is working on his own book right now, I can hardly wait to see that. When I think of Ed and so many others I have met at Pixar like Brad Bird, I know it is possible to be a creative person without being an asshole. In fact, at least if the gossip I keep hearing from Pixar people is true, Jobs was rarely rude or obnoxious in his dealings with people at Pixar because he knew they knew more than him — and even he was infected by Pixar's norm of civility.

8. Creativity,Inc. by Ed Catmull. Price's book is fantastic, but this is one of the best business/leadership/organization design books ever written. As I wrote in my blurb — and this is no B.S.- "“This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: making films that make them feel proud of one another.” Note also that Catmull has a chapter on Steve Jobs that offers a different perspective than anyone else I have seen –and they worked together for decades.

9. The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May.   This 2012 book has more great ideas about how to get rid of what you don't need and how to keep — and add — what you do need than any book ever written. Matt has as engaging a writing style as I have ever encountered and he uses it to teach one great principle after another, from "what isn't there can trump what is" to "doing something isn't always better than doing nothing." Then each principle is followed with five or six very short — and well-edited pieces — from renowned and interesting people of all kinds ranging from executives, to researchers, to artists. It is as fun and useful as non-fiction book can be and is useful for designing every part of your life, not just workplaces.

10. Leading Teams by J. Richard Hackman. When it comes to the topic of groups or teams, there is Hackman and there is everyone else.   If you want a light feel good romp that isn't very evidence-based, read The Wisdom of Teams. If want to know how teams really work and what it really takes to build, sustain, and lead them from a man who has been immersed in the problem as a researcher, coach, consultant, and designer for over 40 years, this is the book for you.

11. Give and Take by Adam Grant. Adam is the hottest organizational researcher of his generation. When I read the pre-publication version, I was so blown away by how useful, important, and interesting that Give and Take was that I gave it the most enthusiastic blurb of my life: “Give and Take just might be the most important book of this young century. As insightful and entertaining as Malcolm Gladwell at his best, this book has profound implications for how we manage our careers, deal with our friends and relatives, raise our children, and design our institutions. This gem is a joy to read, and it shatters the myth that greed is the path to success." In other words, Adam shows how and why you don't need to be a selfish asshole to succeed in this life. America — and the world — would be a better place if all of memorized and applied Adam's worldview.

12. The Path Between the Seas by historian David McCullough. On building the Panama Canal. This is a great story of how creativity happens at a really big scale. It is messy. Things go wrong. People get hurt. But they also triumph and do astounding things. I also like this book because it is the antidote to those who believe that great innovations all come from start-ups and little companies (although there are some wild examples of entrepreneurship in the story — especially the French guy who designs Panama's revolution — including a new flag and declaration of independence as I recall — from his suite in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and successfully sells the idea to Teddy Roosevelt ). As my Stanford colleague Jim Adams points out, the Panama Canal, the Pyramids, and putting a man on moon are just a few examples of great human innovations that were led by governments.

I would love to know of your favorites — and if want a systematic approach to this question, don't forget The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

P.S. Also, for self-defense, I recommend that we all read Isaacson's Steve Jobs — I still keep going places — cocktail parties, family gatherings, talks I give and attend, and even the grocery store where people start talking about Jobs and especially arguing about him. As I explained in Wired and Good Boss, Bad Boss I have come to believe that whatever Jobs was in life, in death he has become a Rorschach test — we all just project our beliefs and values on him.

November 26, 2012
The Best Book Cover Ever? The Denial of Aging

I was exchanging emails with a Harvard University Press editor named Elizabeth Knoll and I commented that the cover of C.K. Gunsalus' The College Administrator's Survival Guide is one of the best I had ever seen. The designer, according the jacket cover is Jill Breitbarth. By the way, the contents of this Guide are also fantastic!

Well, when I mentioned how much I liked that cover, Elizabeth sent me a link to another Harvard cover, the amazing one above, which after some confusion (note this post is corrected), turns out to be by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt — apparently now retired. I can't vouch for the book itself, but especially given the title, that might be the best book cover I have ever seen. I am 58 and there are times when feel like I am that guy with big white beard!

Tell me what you think, and if there is a cover you believe is even better, I would love to see it.

For fun, here is other cover I liked so much

July 5, 2012
Check-out J. Keith Murnighan’s “Do Nothing” for Strange and Fact-Based Advice

Kellogg professor J. Keith Murnighan, my colleague and charming friend, has just published a lovely book called "Do Nothing." I first read the manuscript some months back (and thus could provide the praise you see on the cover) and I just spent a couple hours revisiting this gem.

This crazy book will bombard you with ideas that challenge your assumptions. His argument for doing nothing, for example, kicks-off the book. I was ready to argue with him because, even though I believe the best management is sometimes no management at all, I thought he was being too extreme. But as I read the pros and cons (Keith makes extreme statements, but his arguments are always balanced and evidenced-based), I became convinced that if more managers took this advice their organizations would more smoothly, their people would perform better (and learn more), and they would enjoy better work-life balance.

He convinced me that it this is such a useful half-truth (or perhaps three-quarters-truth) that every boss ought to try his litmus test: Go on vacation, leave your smart phone at home, and don't check or send any messages. Frankly, many bosses I know can't accomplish this for three hours (and I mean even during the hours they are supposed to be asleep), let alone for the three weeks he suggests. As Keith says, an interesting question is what is a scarier outcome from this experiment for most bosses: Discovering how MUCH or how LITTLE their people actually need them.

You will argue with and then have a tough time resisting Keith's logic, evidence, and delightful stories when it comes to his other bits of strange advice as well. I was especially taken with "start at the end," "trust more," "ignore performance goals," and "de-emphasize profits." Keith shows how the usual managerial approach of starting out relationships by mistrusting people and then slowly letting trust develop is not usually as beneficial as starting by assuming that others can be fully trusted until they prove otherwise. He will also show you how to make more money by thinking about money less!

As these bits suggest, Keith didn't write this book with the aim of telling most bosses what they wanted to hear. Rather his goal was to make readers think, to challenge their assumptions, and to show the way to becoming better managers by thinking and acting differently. In a world where we have thousands of business books published every year that all seem to say the same thing, I found Do Nothing delightful and refreshing — not just because it is quirky and fun, but because Keith also shows managers how to try these crazy ideas in low-risk and sensible ways.

June 16, 2012
The Power of Habit: Quick Review

The Power of Habit has been sitting on my desk for a couple months, as the publisher sent me an advance copy. I didn't start reading it until today — although I was most impressed by this recent piece in The New York Times based on the book. What a compelling read! It is evidence-based and great reading — if you want to learn how companies track our habits, try to weave their products into our lives, and how we can understand and change our own habits for the better, it is all there.

I confess that I didn't pick it up because I am not wild about the cover design, It is hard to grasp on quick glance and, well, I do not find it especially attractive — but once I started reading the book, I realized it is the rare cover that actually provides a great compact summary of a book's core ideas. And having struggled with the cover design process myself quite a few times now, I can tell you that it isn't easy getting something as emotionally compelling as Made to Stick or as beautiful as Enchantment. In any event, The Power of Habit reminded me that the old saw "you can't judge a book by it's cover" is true!

March 3, 2012
The Rise of a Culture of Contempt and the Demise of UCLA Men’s Basketball

Work Matters reader and fellow blogger, Chris Yeh, sent me a link to a Sport's Illustrated story about the discouraging downfall of the UCLA basketball program. And I don't mean the drop off in performance at UCLA in the past few years, I mean the loss of its soul and the rise of a culture of contempt — with rampant lousy leadership, bad role models, asshole poisoning. Chris summed it all up well:

It’s terrible. Thank goodness John Wooden isn’t alive, or this would have killed him. To trample on his legacy like this is atrocious.

UCLA's John Wooden, the "Wizard of Westwood" not only won more national championships than any coach of a male college basketball team, he fostered a culture of mutual respect and individual development that turned his players — whether they were superstars like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton or bench-warmers — into more confident, cooperative, and compassionate human beings.

It appears coach Ben Howland has had the opposite effect. As you can see in this excerpt from the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback over at Fast Company on the power of subtraction, there is plenty of evidence that when leaders and peers display bad behavior and don't act swiftly and firmly to stop, the vile actions and attitudes spread like wildfire — and the result isn't just bad performance, it is a culture of contempt that damages everyone involved.

Here is the upshot of the SI story about what happened the last few years under coach Ben Howland:

"Over the last two months SI spoke with more than a dozen players and staff members from the past four Bruins teams. They portrayed the program as having drifted from the UCLA way as Howland allowed an influx of talented but immature recruits to undermine team discipline and morale. Fistfights broke out among teammates. Several players routinely used alcohol and drugs, sometimes before practice. One player intentionally injured teammates but received no punishment."

The story offers many twists and turns, it is long and well-researched. It provides many old but true lessons about how a bad boss can ruin a good team. If you are a leader of a group or organization of any size, it is worth studying and then taking a long hard look in the mirror and asking yourself — am I doing that too? Here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

1. Are you focusing on strategy, but ignoring your team?

Strategy matters, but it is not enough. According to the story this was Howland's general management style. He acted as if the human part of his job was a nuisance. As the article explains:

Other than during practices and games, he had little contact with his athletes, according to players. He showed up moments before a workout began and was gone before players paired off to shoot free throws at the end. Several team members say that his approach was how they imagined an NBA coach would run a team.

2. What behavior do you model?

The SI story reports numerous examples of abusive and disrespectful behavior on his part:

Each of the players who spoke to SI said they found Howland socially awkward and disapproved of the verbal abuse they say he directed at his staff, the student managers and the weakest players. One player said if he saw Howland waiting for the elevator he would take the stairs.

3. Are you so focused on your own needs and wants that you insist that others indulge your little quirks?

The inner focus that comes with power poisoning can cause leaders to indulge and bizarre and petty behavior that — even if they are not aware of it — conveys that they are focused on their own self importance and don't give a hoot about others. For example, SI reports:

The players were puzzled by some of their coach's idiosyncrasies. Howland seemed obsessed with the temperature in the film room. If it was not exactly 76º a student manager was certain to feel Howland's wrath. The water bottles handed to him had to be just cold enough and not too large.

4. Do you apply different rules to "stars" than to other team members even when they take reprehensible actions?

The story describes how star freshman Reeves Nelson was repeatedly physically abusive to fellow players in practice. Here is one of a string of such incidents:

Walk-on Tyler Trapani was another Nelson victim. After Trapani took a charge that negated a Nelson dunk, Nelson went out of his way to step on Trapani's chest as he lay on the ground. Trapani is John Wooden's great-grandson.

There are many other examples, but this one is symbolic as Nelson was literally trampling on a body that contained some of Wooden's DNA. Here is how Howland was reported to have responded to such bad behavior:

After each of the incidents, Howland looked the other way. One team member says he asked Howland after a practice why he wasn't punishing Nelson, to which he said Howland responded, "He's producing."

5. Are you succeeding because the peer culture among your followers is hiding or offsetting your deep flaws?

This is one of the interesting parts of the story, and something every leader should think about. In many cases, teams and organizations succeed DESPITE rather than BECAUSE of their leaders flaws. In Howland's early years at UCLA, when the team was winning and morale among the players was good despite Howland's quirks and flaws, it was apparently due in large part to the tight bonds among the team members, an unusually mature and low ego group (which began unraveling in about 2008):

It was a team of prefects, the protectors of the UCLA dynamic, who looked out for each other, making sure that no one got into trouble, that no one threatened what they were trying to accomplish or what UCLA has always been about. They were a tight group. If they went out, to the movies or a party, they were 15 strong. That kind of camaraderie is not unusual on good teams, but Howland's former players say he had very little to do with instilling it.

6. Is your boss letting YOU get away with toxic and incompetent leadership?

I was pretty stunned to read this:

UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who through a spokesperson declined SI's interview request, told ESPN.com in January, "I need Ben Howland. Why would I even think about looking at someone else?" He added, "By his own admission, [Howland] made some mistakes. But I'm going to work with him. I'm not going to crucify him for those mistakes. Because Ben Howland is a hell of a coach, and anyone who understands basketball, anyone that's been around him, that knows the game, has the utmost respect for what he does as a coach. … We need to turn it around, and we all get that. But we will."

The above quote is quite discouraging as it suggests that, well, so long as he goes back to winning, all is forgiven. As far as I am concerned, if the SI story is accurate, Howland suffers too deeply from power poisoning, committed too many selfish sins, and has demonstrated so much incompetence in dealing with people he is hired to look after and motivate to be allowed to continue in any leadership position.

The problems I've listed only begin to scratch the surface of the damage done under Howland's apparently flawed leadership. I haven't even got into the partying, the players who came to practice still stoned from the night before, and the bench-warmer who couldn't enter a game during "garbage time" because he didn't bother wearing his jersey under his warm-up jacket (the same player now says he can't believe, in retrospect, that he did it — but bad leadership and bad team dynamics cause people to do weird and dysfunctional things).

Apparently, there are signs that Howland is doing a bit better this year and is taking steps to deal with bad behavior. Last year, Howland finally stopped putting up with Reeves Nelson's awful behavior — for example, last season, he finally showed the courage to call fouls on Nelson in practice (in the past, "[Howland] always gave Reeves the benefit of the doubt on foul calls in practice so Reeves wouldn't lose it and be even more disruptive"). Nelson finally was kicked-off the team last November. And now even Nelson and mother believe Howland should have been nipped the bad behavior in the bud. As Nelson told SI:

"I'm not trying to make excuses for what I did, but I got into some weird behavior patterns, and I think my mom was saying that if instead of one big punishment at the end, what if there had been smaller punishments along the way."

Perhaps Howland will change his ways. People do get better and perhaps he will learn to be less of a jerk, be in tune with the people he leads, to avoid letting superstar run roughshod over others, and to do the little bits dirty work when necessary. I am not especially optimistic, especially after smelling the "winning is the only thing" attitude from Howland's boss. Regardless, I believe this is a useful cautionary tale for any boss, and in particular, I think of this guideline in Chapter 1 of The No Asshole Rule:

The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know.

P.S. Note that Reeves Nelson did an interview where he disputes many of the bad things said about him in the article and his law firm is demanding that SI retract the article.

March 3, 2012
Standing on the Sun: Chris Meyer’s and Julia’s Kirby’s Imaginative Masterpiece

About a decade ago, I was talking with Jeff Pfeffer as he raved about Competing for the Future, the 1996 strategy classic written by Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad. Jeff drives me crazy sometimes — he is never wishy-washy anything. But I always listen closely to him because, after all, he is one of the most productive organizational researchers on the planet and one of the three or four most influential organizational theorists of all time. Jeff argued that the book was so important because it not only contained new and emotionally compelling ideas — some backed by strong data, others that were important to test with good data in the future — it contained more intriguing ideas per page than any popular and well-written business book he had ever read.

Well, there is a new book that qualifies for the same praise: Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Will Change Business Everywhere. The ideas here come rapidly but it is so well-written that you don't realize how thoroughly and intensely you are learning new things and the rate at which your assumptions are being challenged. I am biased, but I credit Julia Kirby for this rare magic. Chris is a smart guy, but he has never edited me so perhaps I am not giving him enough credit. Julia — an "Editor at Large" at HBR – is the best and smartest business writer I have ever worked with. There are a lot of good editors out there who make your prose and flow better, but Julia is the only one I know who not only makes your ideas better, she relentlessly adds new ones and challenges you with logic and data when she thinks you are wrong or your logic is sloppy.

Chapter 5 on "Pseudocompetition," for example, unmasks and brings down much of the current hype about size, scale, and competition. At one point, we hear about a Harvard Business Review author who claimed that "industries were in flux, with many becoming more disaggregated and competitive as many others become more concentrated." Well, Julia checked the facts, and as the book says "No dice." This guy was largely wrong, something called the Hirschmann-Herfindahl indexes (the gold standard for measuring market power) showed that — except for a couple "small potatoes" industries — every other industry is becoming more concentrated.

To get out of the weeds, this is the most complete and creative book I know on how the world economy is changing and what it means for the strategies and tactics that leaders all over the world need to implement. Reading the book is a compelling journey, as Meyer and Kirby first explain the key features of the new capitalism that is emerging around the world and then provide advice for businesses and leaders in this new world.

I found the "operating principles" developed in Chapter 9 to be especially especially interesting . These include:

Rule One: Learn to See Results in Color

Old formulation: Measure financial returns to shareholders.

New formulation: Measure the real value sought by stakeholders.

Rule Two: Internalize Externalities

Old formulation: Externalize every cost you can.

New formulation: Own your impact, negative and positive.

Rule Four: Give it Away Until You Charge for It

Old formulation: Focus on your particular value-adding capability and outsource all the rest (except where transaction costs are prohibitive).

New formulation: Pursue collaborative gains through invisible handshakes.

The surrounding discussion around these and the other operating rules are wonderful, and each helped me think of the capitalist world we now live in through a new perspective. Indeed, Rule Four challenges some of the ideas — or at least translations – about "core competence" that emerged from Competing for the Future. And I find Rule Two quite interesting in light of what Apple is learning about the responsibility it needs to take for the alleged mistreatment of employees at supplier Foxconn where wages just went up 25% as well as the environmental impact of suppliers who build their products — in fact, they just announced environmental audits. These recent moves by Apple suggest they are stepping up to "own" both their positive and negative impact — and as Chris and Julia suggest, they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it because it is necessary for protecting Apple's reputation and legitimacy.

Standing on the Sun is not a quick and mindless read. But if you want an unusually well-written book that is chock-full of new insights about the capitalist world we now live in and about what leaders and businesses can do to survive and thrive in these deeply weird and disconcerting times, this is the book for you.

February 20, 2012