Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • The Asshole Survival Guide: My Latest Book

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    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.  

  • My Organizational Behavior Class: The Current Iteration

    The first time I taught an introductory organizational behavior class was in 1980 or 1981. I was a second-year doctoral student in organizational psychology at The University of Michigan.  I had no teaching experience (except for one guest lecture I had given to a large undergrad class — it was terrible; harried and dull). Yet that didn't stop the the Michigan Business School from giving me the chance to teach the class to some 60 students. I sure learned a lot that year… I still remember the strapping 250 pound football player who broke down in tears after he failed a test (to his credit, he passed the class once he started studying harder).  

    I have taught various versions of the class perhaps 35 times by now, and in some ways it remains the same.  There are certain topics that, at least in my view, always ought to be included such as motivation, employee selection and socialization, influence, leadership, and teams.  Over the years, I have started emphasizing innovation and organizational culture a bit more, and I do focus more explicitly on evidence-based management and the challenges of weaving academic research with real managerial decisions and actions.  

    And perhaps the main change is that I do straight lecture less and introduce more interaction.  Although I still present material, I press students more to comment, to do lots of short writing assignments, to work in teams, to do short presentations, and to do in-class interactive exercises. I also bring in more people from the "real world" who can bring the lessons from the class alive. Every year, I add another small element or two to make the class a bit more interactive and realistic. And now, I put most of the materials on an online platform called NovoEd, which makes things a lot easier.  But the heart of the class happens live — the platform just makes things easier.  It still is a different animal than the leadership class that I help to teach at the Stanford d.school, as there is still a lot of discussion, reading, and writing, while the "d.leadership" class entails embedding duos in organizations with the aim of making them more creative. 

    My favorite part of the organizational behavior class is the final exam. Students learn the question on the very first day of class: "Design the ideal organization: Use course concepts to defend your answer."  It is VERY difficult, it forces students to think all term about which lessons matter most and how they fit together, and the best exams are astoundingly good.  And when students try to write it the night before (despite all sorts of measures to stop them, including a draft due about 10 days before the deadline), it shows.  I wrote a post here on the final a few years back, and as I said, I guess my answer to the question is The No Asshole Rule! although I didn't restrict myself to 2000 or 3000 words! 

    I start teaching it again in a few days, and I am, as usual, quite excited to do so.   Here is the outline if you are interested (note that about 80% of the links are live and most of the readings are free to anyone): 280_Syllabus_2015Winter_In_Class_JAN3rdRIS. 

    This class is taught in the the Stanford Engineering School, as is our d.school class (the d.school is also part of the Engineering School, although a lot of MBAs do take our classes), but I do think that, despite all the hand wringing about how irrelevant traditional management education is becoming and how the MBA education is going to become "disrupted" is overblown.  Yes, we are moving things onto the web for efficiency reasons, and a lot of the stuff on the web is becoming more social, interactive, and realistic.

    But there is still no substitute for a live class discussion, having an in person interaction with someone like IDEO's marketing head  Whitney Mortimer or earlier stage venture capitalist Michael Dearing, or sitting down, face to face, and going through line after line of a draft with a student.  In fact,my view is that what we've been learning from online education is teaching us to make in-class education better (to focus on what works best live and in-person) and what we learn in-class makes online education better (e.g., an online "lecture" is a lot better after you have given it live to 10 or 15 groups).  In addition, it many cases, the dividing line between "online" and "off" is blurring, as we might give students an assignment online, then have them do it live in-class or in a company, and then perhaps post it on an online platform.  

    So while there always be bumps along the way, I am optimistic that "traditional" business education is changing for the better as a result of all the online stuff, and the online stuff will keep getting better too, but it won't go away anytime soon. 

  • 12 Books That Every Leader Should Read: Updated

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    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."

    Book-mts3. 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.

    Creativity-Inc.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.

  • Huggy Rao, Scaling, and Me: An Excellent, Exacting, and Eccentric Adventure

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    During the seven years that Huggy Rao and I worked on Scaling Up Excellence, we got involved in some pretty unusual situations – at least for two rather staid old professors. We did everything from working with a company that was trying to improve the (terrible) customer experience in their chain of budget gas stations (I guess things were supposed to get better through magic, as they rejected any suggestion that took time or money) to the incredibly time-consuming but strangely satisfying process we went through to get a book cover design that we liked (that is fodder for another post – we went through many, many prototypes).

    The sequence produced in the above picture was among the most amusing and (I confess) mot diagnostic of how difficult and picky I can be to work with AND how gracious, patient, and curious Huggy was and remains. My compulsiveness is, I think, often helpful when writing a book, as the process requires numerous iterations and constant editing. One of my favorite lines about writing comes from Aldous Huxley: "All my thoughts are second thoughts." That is me.  Or, more precisely, all my thoughts are third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. I revise text so much that this compulsion led to some admittedly absurd situations. I don’t think that Huggy fully understood why he had to call me from Iceland to spend 30 minutes talking about two sentences in the draft that I didn't like, but he did so with good humor and as usual made inspired suggestions.

    To return to the pictures, we already had plenty of photos of the two of us, but given how I am about pretty much everything, I insisted that we not settle for something easy or second rate or boring, that we do something interesting for the jacket photo. I immediately thought ofClaudia Goetzelmann, who, some seven years earlier, when I first started my blog Work Matters, took that weird and wonderful picture of me next to that “thinker” statue at The New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford that has been at the top of this blog since the I first started (thanks to Diego Rodriguez of Metacool fame.) That crazy first above was all Claudia’s idea. Once she saw that statue, something went off in her brain and she took picture after picture of me in various odd poses with that statue.

    This time, Claudia asked if, before she took the pictures, if she could scout out nearby locations. We wrongly assumed the location would actually be on the Stanford campus and would be be something rather traditional and academic – standing in front of books, teaching a room full of students, or perhaps a shot of us in serious scholarly conversation. That is not quite how Claudia’s mind works. She decided, after driving around for several hours, that the best light in the afternoon was next to the Dumbarton Bridge that connects the lower San Francisco Peninsula to the East Bay – a pretty weird location, we thought, as it was a good 20 minutes from Stanford – there were no academic trappings, just a grassy sandy marsh, the bay, and a big bridge packed with noisy smelly traffic. (Indeed, see Diego's latest post. Claudia is a spoon bender of the best kind). 

    Claudia also wrote and asked if she could spend 30 bucks on two picture frames as she thought that they would make for an interesting picture. I thought she was nuts, The idea of jamming our heads together in a frame did not seem becoming of two serious scholars like us, but I did not want to interfere with the creative process. When we saw them, we started laughing. Then we really started giggling when we saw that Claudia had hired a make-up artist to “touch you up.” It didn’t seem to us as if make-up would help us look any younger or prettier. But we remembered Richard Nixon shiny head and sweaty lip fiasco after he refused make-up when he debated John Kennedy on TV in the 1960s, so we both agreed to accept a bit of powder and lip goo of some kind.

    Claudia was so energetic and encouraging that the experience was really fun. I think we had been laughing nonstop for an hour by the time she took the above picture – her favorite after taking perhaps 1000 pictures of us in various poses (at least 100 with us actually standing up against the bridge wall). When we arrived, we were in coats and ties – Claudia humored us and took some pictures, but soon had us remove them because they made us look too boring.

    As a result of Claudia’s imagination, skill, and infectious enthusiasm, the book jacket will have a picture we love. I doubt it will help sell any books. It might even drive people away who decide that two guys in a crooked picture frame (and who look like they are about to dissolve into laughter) couldn't possibly write a rigorous and relevant book on scaling or any other business topic. But, for us, the picture feels right because it symbolizes so much about the seven year “adventure” that led to Scaling Up Excellence. We both were willing to try something weird that made us a bit uncomfortable, I pushed for a compulsive, time consuming, and arguably unnecessary solution that required trying a lot of ideas and throwing most away, Huggy was patient and bemused throughout (even when most sane people would tell me to bug off), and we had good fun.

    So that is how we ended up with that crazy picture. We hope you like it.

    Note: This first appeared on LinkedIN in one of my "Influencer" columns.  I edited it slightly. 

  • Three Hallmarks of Good Performance Evaluations

    Phyllis Korkki of the New York Times wrote a piece this Sunday for her Workstation column called Invasion of the Annual Reviews.  It emphasizes the risks and downsides of annual reviews, and she quotes me quite a bit — I didn't realize how much until the piece came out.  But she got it right, as she always does (I have worked with her before, she is very professional and very careful).  As Phyllis had only so many words to work with, and she weaves in the perspectives of others including an interesting clarifying statement from a Yahoo! spokesperson asserting they are not doing forced ranking, but rather "“Our system lets employees understand how they are performing relative to expectations (exceeding, achieving or missing), and there are no hard and fast rules.” 

    I got a couple emails from friends — one congratulatory and the other that disagreed with me — suggesting that the piece meant I was opposed to all annual performance reviews, not just bad performance reviews.  I confess that I have raised the question of if they should be abolished before and two parts of the piece may have helped to fuel this impression:

    This paraphrase from Phyllis:

    Professor Sutton is wary of rankings and yearly evaluations in general. Many organizations, he said, would be better off if they provided continuous feedback, with formal evaluations coming into play mainly if a worker is being eyed for promotion or has shown substandard performance.

    And the closing paragraph:

    “If performance evaluations were a drug, they would not receive F.D.A. approval,” he said, because “they have so many side effects, and so often they fail.”

    These are accurate representations of my perspective.  But I think it is important to make clear that I am not opposed to all performance evaluations, only bad ones. — and unfortunately, they are done badly more often then they are done well.  So, what are the hallmarks of good performance evaluations?  Consider three:

    1. Is what happens during that annual conversation and evaluation woven into the fabric of every day life, or as I was quoted in the piece "“this weird form you fill out every year that has nothing to do with everyday life.”  So if your boss gives you positive feedback all year, or doesn't give you feedback at all over the course of the year, and then you get bad review, the boss isn't doing his or her job.  In organizations that generally do evaluations well, I think of McKinsey and GE, although they do yearly evaluations, there is also an emphasis on teaching and nudging leaders to constantly give their direct reports regular coaching and feedback.  There are two tests here.

    If you are a boss, do people often seem surprised by the feedback you give them during annual reviews?

    Does the review conversation seem uncomfortable and unnatural, something that bears no relationship between the feedback and coaching (or lack of it) that happens throughout the year. 

    2. How is excellent performance defined and measured?  In some firms, even though the goal is to create collaboration and information sharing, "stars" are nonetheless anointed solely on the basis of individual achievements (and for more senior folks, on the basis of their team of department's contribution, not on their contribution to the overall success of the organization).  In too many companies, although leaders hope for cooperation, they reward backstabbing, stomping on others on the way to the top, and other flavors of dysfunctional internal competition.  So the question of "who is a superstar here" is the one I ask leaders all the time, I want to know "are they the people who are great individual performers AND who help others succeed — or are the people that ignore and even undermine their colleagues?"  This is a theme that Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote about in our books on The Knowing-Doing Gap and Hard Facts, and I revisit in Good Boss, Bad Boss. Note also that both GE and McKinsey are usually very careful to anoint the right kind of stars — and so are a lot of other organizations I admire including IDEO, P&G, and the Cleveland Clinic. 

    3. Finally, while I believe strongly in weeding out bad apples and rewarding good behavior, what are the assumptions about the nature of a human organization?  Do leaders believe that there will always be a certain percentage of losers who will need to be weeded out and a certain percentage of amazing performers who deserve the lion's share of rewards.  This is the assumption that drives many stack ranking and one I don't like and that is contrary to the evidence.  It is also contrary to the logic of the quality movement (which weirdly, GE who at least had this system in the past embraced as well).  Imagine a manufacturing system or worse yet a hospital where you assumed that year over that there would be a 10% defect rate, 70% of the work would only be OK, and only 20% would be great.  Unfortunately, that is the implication of how stack ranking is done in some places, even other wise very well managed places.  

    Here is how things can play out when this assumption is implemented in a misguided way.  One senior executive I know had spent years building a great 12 person team.  He hired carefully, he weeded out a few rotten apples, and has the team humming.  Then, the company hired a head of HR who had unwavering faith in firing the bottom 10% each year — he was required to fire one of his people.  In essence, following the logic of Deming and other quality gurus, he had built a system with no defective parts — but was required to throw one away.  He refused to do it and quit — which, as he told them, solved their problem, because now they didn't have to fire a member of his team (which they did anyway, as he "didn't count.") 

    I hope this clarifies my views.  Note that the NYT's piece also talks a bit about Adobe's recent efforts to abolish annual reviews and replace them with frequent check-ins.  Huggy Rao and had in-depth conversations with Donna Morris, the brave executive who led this change, and we talk about the details in our forthcoming book Scaling Up Excellence.  The upshot is that Donna and her colleagues worked on shifting the focus from the mechanics of annual reviews to the nuances of daily interactions between leaders and their teams.

    I am quite interested in the path that Adobe is taking because the result may be that, indeed, there is a better alternative to yearly performance evaluations.  Indeed, note that, in the places that do them well, they are woven into the fabric of everyday life — so perhaps an interesting test of how bad  AND how good your annual performance evaluation is "what would happen if we didn't do them?"  Oddly, if you are doing them really badly, then I would argue that doing nothing might be better.  Just give employees an envelope with their yearly raise and skip that stilted dysfunctional disingenuous yearly conversation.  And if you are doing things really well, then perhaps you will find out that you don't need them after all because people are getting such regular feedback and coaching that the formalities are a waster of time in most cases– think of all the time and money you would save! 

  • Creativity,Inc. by Pixar’s Ed Catmull: One of the Best Business Books of All Time

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    Ed Catmull has been one of my favorite senior executives for a long time.  I admired him from afar after reading about him in David Price's excellent The Pixar Touch.  I admired him even more after talking to people at Pixar about what it was like to work with him (see this story). And then I got to him a little through several interactions I had with him as part of authors' group here in the San Francisco area and also, when Huggy Rao and I interviewed him for Scaling Up Excellence.  

    The most interesting, and I think revealing, interactions I have had with Ed, however, have not been in person — they have come from the process of reading and commenting on an earlier draft of his book, and exchanging emails with him.  And, most recently, reading the finished product.  I won't go through all the twists and turns of the process, but Ed (and obviously his co-writer Amy Wallace, who I did not interact with directly) clearly were dedicated to getting it right,  Even in that early draft, the astounding and intertwined stories of Ed's life and Pixar's development into one of greatest companies on the planet were riveting, as were his insights about building a creative company that run throughout the book. But, as Ed and his Pixar colleagues do, he wasn't just satisfied with just a good book, he took the time and effort, and went through one difficult iteration after another, to make a book that just sings.  You will have trouble putting it down once you pick it up.  And while it may seem like it just rolled out with ease, as with most great things, Ed and Amy wouldn't let it go until it was right. 

    It was privilege to get a few glimpses of how Ed's mind works during the process, especially over the Christmas-New Years break last year when I read the book closely and gave Ed several rounds of comments (I would read a few chapters, and then send him another note). My favorite exchange came at one juncture, after reading the section where Ed describes the sequence of events where he, Steve Jobs, and others were involved in selling Pixar to Disney and announcing it to his people in Emeryville, where Pixar is located and those wonderful movies are made.

     It was pretty deep into the book.  And I finally realized that it had a problem I had never seen in any book written by a successful executive, as I put it to Ed "not enough narcissism."  There wasn't ENOUGH information about the influence he was having, the words he was saying, or about how he turned his considerable wisdom into action. There was plenty about other people, folks like Steve Jobs and John Lasseter that reflected his keep empathy and observational powers.  As I read the final version, I saw that Ed perspective and influence is emphasized just enough for my tastes now — although his trademark modesty persists.

    The book isn't out to until April.  But you should pre-order it now, you will want to read it right away. Here is my blurb — I hope you love this book (and admire Ed's smarts, values, and accomplishments) as much as I did:

    “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."

    P.S. Note that I have revised my list of books that every leader should read to include Creativity, Inc.

    P.P.S. When I wrote to Ed how much  I liked the cover, he said something like "well, we have some pretty good artists here." No kidding. Isn't it beautiful? 

  • 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 Corporation 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.

  • The Marketoonist on Attila the Manager

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    I got a note from a manager about this cartoon and story at the Marketoonist, which is drawn and written by Tim Fishburne — he talks about The No Asshole Rule and the problem of brillant jerks. Check out his site, it is filled with great stuff — like this cartoon and story about my least-favorite U.S. company, United Airlines.

    P.S. I am sorry I have not been blogging much, I am hoping to turn up the volume and have a lot of things to write about, especially Matt May's new book The Laws of Subtraction.  But life keeps getting in the way!

  • Rare Wisdom from Citrix CEO Mark Templeton about Hiearchy and Respect

    I confess that as an avid reader of The New York Times, I have been disappointed in recent years because they devote too much space to interviews with CEOs and other bosses. Notably, it seems to me that they run the same column twice every Sunday: Adam Bryant's "The Corner Office" and another interview column called "The Boss."  I do love many of these interviews anyway, as The Times gets interesting people and their editing makes things better.  And I am a big fan of Adam Bryant's book, The Corner Office, as it did a great job of transcending the column.   What bugs me, however, is that The Times devotes so much of the paper to interviews now, I suspect, because it is simply cheaper than producing hard-hitting investigative journalism.  They do an occasional amazing in-depth story, but there is too much fluff and not enough tough for my tastes.  

    That said, some of the interviews are still striking.  One of the best I have ever read appeared a couple years back, with Citrix CEO Mark Templeton. The whole interview is unusually thoughtful and reminds me that people who don't see themselves as CEOs and don't lust after the position often turn out to be the best candidate for the job (related point: see this study that shows groups tend to pick people with big mouths to lead but that less pushy and extroverted leaders tend to lead more effective teams — at least when the teams were composed of proactive members).   In particular, however, I was taken with this quote from Templeton:

    You have to make sure you never confuse the hierarchy that you need for managing complexity with the respect that people deserve. Because that’s where a lot of organizations go off track, confusing respect and hierarchy, and thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect. So hierarchy is a necessary evil of managing complexity, but it in no way has anything to do with respect that is owed an individual.

    If you say that to everyone over and over and over, it allows people in the company to send me an e-mail no matter what their title might be or to come up to me at any time and point out something — a great idea or a great problem or to seek advice or whatever.

    There is so much wisdom here, including:

    1. While there are researchers and other idealists running around and urging companies to rip down their hierarchies and to give everyone equal power and decision rights, and this notion that we are all equal in every way may sound like a lovely thought, the fact is that people prefer and need pecking orders and other trappings of constraint such as rules and procedures. As Templeton points out so wisely, organizations need hierarchies to deal with complexity.  Yes, some hierarchies are better than others — some are too flat, some have to many layers, some have bad communication flows, and organizational designers should err on making them as "light" and "simple" as possible — but as he says, they are a necessary evil.

    2.  His second point really hits home and is something that all too many leaders — infected with power poisoning — seem to forget as they sit at the top of the local pecking order "thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect."  When leaders believe and especially act on this belief, all sorts of good things happen, including your best people stay (even if you can't pay them as much as competitors), they feel obligated to return the respect by giving their all to the organization (and feel obligated to press their colleagues to do as well), and a norm of treating people with dignity and respect emerges and is sustained.  Plus, as Templeton points out, because fear is low and respect is high, people at the top tend to get more truth — and less CYA and ass-kissing behavior.

    No organization is perfect.  But a note for all the bosses out there.  If you read Templeton's quote a few times and think about what it means for running your organization, it can help you take a big step toward excellence in terms of both the performance and well-being among the people you lead.

  • Malicious Compliance

    I appreciate the interesting comments and suggestions in response to my last post on different levels of felt accountability.  Readers may recall that I proposed — from best to worst – that a team or organization can be characterized as having people who feel everything from authorship. mutual obligation, indifference, and mutual contempt.  I have especially been thinking about this comment from Justdriven, which builds on a prior comments by AnnieL:

    "Regarding
    your first question, I think AnneL may have identified a fifth category
    between mutual obligation and indifference which would be fear driven
    box checking. This would be the case where individuals follow procedures
    out of a fear of retribution rather than an endorsement of said
    procedures. This would seem to be what the pilot experienced. This stage
    would be a slippery slope that takes you from mutual obligation to
    indifference and then contempt."

    I am taken with "fear driven box-checking" as it seems to be both a symptom and a cause, where people who feel powerless have no ability — and thus no obligation — to help make things go well because the system makes it impossible regardless of how good their intentions might be.  This comment also got me thinking about how, in some systems, people can zoom past indifference and move to mutual contempt by following the rules exactly as a way to fight back against a bad system or boss — especially when there are bad standing rules or orders for a given challenge.   "Working to rule" is a classic labor slow down tactic, and there is some sweet revenge and irony when you get back at company or person  that you don't like by following their instructions to the letter. 

    More broadly, I have been interested in the notion of "malicious compliance" for a long time.  In Chapter 6 of Good Boss, Bad Boss I wrote about how it is sometimes used to get back at a bad or incompetent boss, or in the example below, by bosses to shield their people from a lousy boss up the chain of command:

    I know bosses who employ the opposite strategy to undermine and drive out incompetent superiors. One called it “malicious compliance,” following idiotic orders from on high exactly to the letter, thereby assuring the work would suck. This is a risky strategy, of course, but I once had a detailed conversation with a manager at an electronics firm whose team built an ugly and cumbersome product prototype. After it was savaged by the CEO, the manager carefully explained (and documented) that his team had done exactly as the VP of Engineering ordered, and although he voiced early and adamant objections to the VP, he gave up because “it was like talking to a brick wall.”
    So this manager and his team decided ‘Let’s give him exactly what he wants, so we just said “yes sir” and followed his lousy orders precisely.’ The VP of engineering lost his job as a result. Again, this is a dangerous and destructive strategy, and I would advise any boss to only use it as a last resort.

    I would be curious to hear of other examples of malicious compliance — and if you have any ideas of how to create conditions so it won't happen. Its is one of this sick but fascinating elements of organizational life.