Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • Power Players and Profanity: Talking About Talking Dirty on NPR

    I have been blogging a bit here about the strategic use of swearing (see here and here), which was originally inspired by Dan McGinn's great post at HBR on "Should Leaders Ever Swear?" This was followed by a podcast at HBR where I talked about about the same subject.  NPR got wind of all this and I was interviewed for a story that aired on NPR yesterday, on All Things Considered.  It is called Power Players and Profanity, and it a four minute segment that covers characters from Carol Bartz and Michelle Obama, to President's Obama and Bush, to General George Patton.  Here is a little excerpt from the transcript:

    Gen. Patton was once quoted as saying, "When I want it to stick, I
    give it to them loud and dirty." Sutton says that's consistent with the
    idea that words are just tools in an executive toolbox.

    "Sometimes, when you really need that wallop, you want to
    get out the word. But then there's other times when you don't want to
    give it to them 'loud and dirty,' because you embarrass them. You get
    them all cranked up and you've got a mess on your hands."

    This comment was inspired by  inspired by by psychologist Timothy Jay's work on
    the evolutionary value of swearing. As noted in an earlier post, he wrote: Taboo words persist because they
    can intensify emotional communication to a degree that nontaboo words
    cannot .  Fuck you!
    immediately conveys a level of contempt unparalleled by nontaboo words;
    there is no way to convey Fuck You! with polite speech." 

    Finally, a comment about the experience with NPR; I was interviewed on Friday by Lynn Neary, on tape, and had felt as if I had not answered a couple of the questions very well.  NPR's great editing made me sound much more coherent than I was, and I appreciate it.  

    P.S. The link to the story has both a written summary and the audio.


  • Take the B.O.S.S. — Bob’s Official Superior Scorecard

    The people at Rypple seem to be going nuts in anticipation of the webinar that starts in less than hour, and they clearly work to deadlines!  They also just finished a 15 item quiz called the B.O.S.S. that you can take to determine which fictional famous boss you are most like — Darth Vader, Miranda Priestly, Michael Scott, and so on.  I just took it, and it said I was Captain Kirk.  Honestly, I am not that good a boss, so I think the B.O.S.S. might not be quite tough enough, but it is fun.  I wrote the questions, but they did the rest.  I hope you find it as fun and funny as I did — and the questions do link quite well to the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss.

    Again, you can take it here, and you will see that you can share the results with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, or email. 

  • The Top 10 Worst Fictional Bosses

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    I was reading the Rypple blog this morning in anticipation of the Good Boss, Bad Boss webinar they are hosting at 2 Eastern today.  There is a great new post there by Alanah Throop on The Top 10 Worst Fictional Bosses.  Check it out.  I don't want to ruin the fun, but in looking at the list and thinking of the worst bosses, I would argue that to be really awful, a boss needs to be both an asshole and incompetent at getting things done.  So I would say, for example that some of the folks on their list like Darth Vader and Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada definitely qualify as certified assholes, but I would not rate them as the worst of the worst because they are good at getting things done.  And both did show a modicum of compassion eventually. So that leaves me with bosses who are both certified assholes and incompetent.  For me, the winner is Bill Lumbergh from Office Space.  His veneer of consideration combined with incessant nagging for TPS reports and other acts cruelty and incompetence are tough to beat.  Also, for bonus points, above he is pictured wearing the infamous asshole collar.

    Who would top your list? 


  • Today at 2 Eastern: Free Good Boss, Bad Boss Webinar Hosted By Rypple

     Rypple is a company
    that sells "social software" that is designed to make giving (and
    getting) frequent feedback easier and more constructive.  They are
    hosting a free one hour webinar on
    Good Boss, Bad Boss.     It will be today at 2:00 PM Eastern (or
    11 AM Pacific).  I will talk about the main ideas in the book for 40
    minutes or so and then we will open it up to Q&A.  Please go here
    to
    sign-up.

    I look forward to it, especially to your questions
    and comments.

  • Do You Have Their Backs? Or Just Your Own?

    One of the chapters in Good Boss, Bad Boss is called "Serve as a Human Shield" and it argues — and shows how — the best bosses protect their people from idiots and idiocy of every stripe, from overly nosy executives and visitors, to moronic procedures, to meetings that run too long or never should have been held in the first place, and a host of other intrusions, distractions, and needless sources of friction that make it harder to do their work and to sustain good mental health.   I have a Harvard Business Review article coming out in fall that digs into this question, and today, at HBR.org, I posted the 5th point on my list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe.  It is called: Do You Have Their Backs?  Or Just Your Own?  Here is a taste:

    Robert Townsend might be the poster child for the kind of boss that
    provides tangible cover to his team. He tends to be known at this point
    for having written the most outrageous management book ever published, Up
    the Organization    . It's a collection of 150 or so ruminations
    on business life that are delightful, irreverent, and sometimes
    politically incorrect — all penned in an era before blogs were invented
    and such things were called short essays. But Townsend gleaned his
    insights from his succession of management jobs, notably as CEO of Avis
    Rent-a-car, where he was a widely loved wildman. In contrast to the
    usual hollow rhetoric, he never left any doubt that the people of his
    organizations came first, and that his job as a boss was to serve as
    defender and warrior on their behalf. Once, for example, he fought off a
    request from a powerful Avis board member, National Broadcasting
    Company founder David Sarnoff (aka
    "The General"), that would have been a time sink for his staff. Sarnoff
    couldn't believe there was no accurate tally of all the cars that Avis
    owned, and demanded that one be produced — a task that would have taken
    weeks. In that kind of situation, any of us can imagine rolling our
    eyes, but in a choose-your-battles world, how many of us would have
    refused? Townsend did, because he knew his people had more important
    work to do. "If I don't need it to run the company," he told Sarnoff,
    "you sure as hell don't need that information as an outside director."

    Even more telling, for me, was the time Townsend was stopped in the
    hall by his own boss. This was earlier in his career, at American
    Express, and the firm's Chairman wanted to express his pleasure with a
    "good bond swap" by Townsend's group. Again, how would most people use
    that face time? In Townsend's case, it wasn't to take credit and jockey
    for his next promotion. He replied that he didn't even know about the
    swap, and complained colorfully about how hard it was to get resources
    and better pay for the undervalued people doing such magnificent work.
    He chose to cover their backs, in other words, rather than climb over
    them.

    This topic of bosses as "human shields" is one I have discussed here before a bit (see here and here), but I dig into in much more detail at HBR.org than in the past.  Let me know what you think, either here or there, as I am always interested in the means that good bosses use to shield their people so they can do good work and do it with dignity.

  • “Galleys” of Good Boss, Bad Boss Available for 50 Active Bloggers

    If you've been reading this blog lately, you know that I've got a new book coming out in September called Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst. As all of you also know, the book business is in a period of profound transition, and the ways that publishers produce and market books is in flux.  My view, after talking to lots of people in the business over the past year, the bad news is that it is a period where "nobody knows anything," but the good news is that it is a period where many people in the business know that many of their old skills and assumptions are obsolete.  The other bit of good news — at least to me, as I am attracted to the notion of pushing the envelope — is that they are willing to try weird new things.  This blog post is one of them.

    As some of you may know, one of the ways that publishers promote books for authors is that they print a bunch of "galleys" or "advanced copies" of the book — essentially cheap paperback versions of the book that usually have a few typos and may need a little more editing — to send to the press and other opinion leaders.  In recent years, publishers and publicist have also made a practice of sending advanced copies of books to influential bloggers.  I am a big believer in this practice, in part, because I believe that — more than anything else — the success of The No Asshole Rule was driven by early buzz on the blogs, and in particular, a key early post followed a couple months later by a post on the ARSE test by the amazing Guy Kawasaki. 

    We are using a similar strategy to create buzz and encourage people to do pre-orders at places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  I have written a lot of bloggers I know to ask if they would like a galley, and now that the power of blogs has been recognized in the book business, the publicists I am working with have supplied my lists of influential blogs — ones visited by many people each day.  So I have written many of the people on the list, even when I don't know them.  I have been pleasantly surprised by how nearly all have written back and the support and enthusiasm they've expressed.  This is weird to say, but the occasional rejections have been equally wonderful.  I especially liked Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame), as he wrote that he was really too busy to do it, and added that he would probably never read a hard copy of any book again!  I still like the old-fashioned hard copies (although I also like reading books on my wife's Kindle, but not so much on my IPad as I wrote here).

    In addition to this strategy of writing notes to a bunch of bloggers I know or hope might be interested in my book, I also would like to give the opportunity to bloggers I have may have overlooked or don't know to get a copy of the galley, and I hope, say something about it on their blog if they find it interesting.  So, if you are an active blogger, please write me and my publisher will send you a galley, which should arrive in the next couple weeks.   I am trying to keep this as open and "non-elite" as possible, but there are few guidelines:

    1.  We have 50 galleys to mail out, when they are gone, they are gone.

    2.  Because my publisher — which is paying to send these out — sells the book primarily in the U.S. and Canada, this is restricted to bloggers in those countries. 

    3.  I don't care how many visitors you have, but I do care that you have a legitimate blog and that you blog actively (say at least three or for times a month?). So please send me the URL and your email so I can check it out.  We also will need a mailing address so we can send you the galley, so please include that in your note. Also, although I think I am pretty open-minded, I reserve the right to decline to send a galley to blog that offends my (biased) sensibilities.

    4.  If you are interested, and "fit" the above guidelines, please send a note with the above information to my gmail account.

    If you do get a galley, posting anytime is fine should you decide to do that, and it would be especially nice if you provided a link to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or another online seller and gently encouraged your readers who are interested in buying the book to consider pre-ordering it — as that helps the book succeed.

    Note I have never tried anything like this before and therefore not entirely sure what I am doing — so please forgive me if I am doing anything badly or unfair. Whether you are a blogger or not, please let me know what you think of this idea and if you have any suggestions of how to make it flow easier for either bloggers or my publisher and me.  Thanks so much, and I will give you a report about how this little experiment turns out. 

  • Wall Street Journal Selects Good Boss, Bad Boss as a Business Book “To Read at the Beach.”

    I was pleased to hear that Kyle Stock from the Wall Street Journal selected Good Boss, Bad Boss as one of "Six
    Business Books to Read at the Beach.    "  I was also a little
    surprised because it won't be available officially until September 7,
    although they way the book business works, copies will likely begin to be
    available by August 20th or so.   In any case, I appreciate the vote of
    confidence, and here is the rest of is list.  All sound interesting,
    but the one I just ordered was "The Upside of Irrationality" as Dan
    Ariely is brilliant and that sounds like a great topic:

    Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hiseh

    Multipliers, by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown

    Employees First, Customers Second, by Vineet Nay

    The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor

    The Upside of Irrationality, by Dan
    Ariely

     I would also add Chip and Dan Heath's Switch and the deeply insightful and most troubling The Invisible Gorilla.  And, if you never read it, the astounding Orbiting the Giant Hairball — still the best creativity book ever written. 

    What would you add?  What would you subtract?

  • Podcast at HBR: The subtleties of strategic swearing

    It was one of those things that, even as I did it, I was wondering, how my life had reached this point.  The soundtrack that kept playing in mu mind was the Talking Heads, singing over and over, "Who am I? How did I get there?"  There I was — and I guess still am –talking with a very respectable Harvard editor — Sarah Green –  about the strategic use of swearing by bosses.  You can listen to the podcast if you like, they just posted it here.  This podcast weaves together issues from Dan McGinn's wildly popular HBR post Should Leaders Ever Swear?, and my follow-up posts here on strategic swearing and the evolutionary value of swearing.  In the podcast and my posts I am careful to talk about the dangers of swearing at the wrong time and places, and of swearing too much.  But I also am quite taken with the argument from academic work on the evolutionary value that " Taboo words persist because they
    can intensify emotional communication to a degree that nontaboo words
    cannot."  

    This topic stirred up numerous clashing opinions on my blog, from people who argued that it was inappropriate under any circumstances, to people who swore at the workplace and felt bad about it, to people who disliked their colleagues' swearing, to people who said it was bad for children.  Two of my favorites made me think hardest — albeit in opposing directions:

    This one from Liam-og Griffin struck my fancy both because I like the idea of strategic swearing (at the right times, as except when I talk about The No Asshole Rule, I virtually never swear when I teach or give a speech) and it fits very well with the evolutionary argument:


    The
    'f' word is unrivaled in power in the English language. It's got
    aggression built in and demands to be heard. Choosing to avoid the use
    of powerful words like this is like choosing to use a screwdriver to
    drive a screw, when you've got a 24v drill driver in the back of the
    van. Distinguished craftsmen would advocate the eloquence of using your
    hands to create beautiful works of art in the same way a writer would
    only use 'acceptable' language to colourfully express the full spectrum
    of emotions.
    I've got no problem if you want to be old school and proud of the
    craftsmanship of your handy work, but you're out of your fucking mind if
    you don't use the best tool for the job!

    I love the last sentence.  On the other hand, I was stopped in my tracks by a great point from a fellow who used to work at UCLA and had numerous conversations with the late John Wooden, the greatest and wisest basketball coach who ever lived:


    Words
    are tools – we tend to use the tools the most that have worked the best
    for us in the past. My wife often uses the butt end of a screwdriver
    to drive a nail. Makes me cringe, but she always seems to reach her
    goal.
    "Goodness gracious sakes alive."
    That was all the swearing Coach Wooden ever needed. It's just a
    matter of how you choose to apply your tools.

    Coach Wooden is a tough act to follow!  This is one of those cases, I confess, where I hold conflicting and inconsistent opinions.  I try not to swear when it offends others or makes me look like an immature and inconsiderate jerk, but there are lot of times when it is the norm in a particular group, there are times when strategic use has effective shock value (I think the title of The No Asshole Rule is such a case), and their are times when I get pissed-off, swear, and then feel bad about it.

    I also have a view about children that others may not hold: Even if you don't swear around them, most will learn to do it a very young age, and swear when their parents and other adults are not around.  One of my favorite memories of my two daughters — my youngest Eve was about 3 and big sister Claire was about 6 — happened one day when they were outside my study (they didn't know I was there)and Claire was teaching Eve how to perform the word "shit."  Not just say it, I mean perform it.  I would hear, "Now Eve, you don't just say shit, you stomp your foot and you look real mad, like this…" and then Claire would model the desired behavior, and say "OK you try it."  And then I would hear something like "That is OK, but stomp your foot harder and try to look a little madder." The Eve would say "Oh shit" and I would hear her foot stomp and big sister would say, "You've almost got it, try it one more time." 

    So, while swearing at the wrong times and in front of the wrong people is bad for children, my belief is they are going to do it mighty early themselves, and the best you can hope for is they will learn to use it sparingly and at the right times — and when those times come, to do it well! 

    We likely have exhausted this topic on this blog and at HBR.  I will get back to something else, but the podcast got me going on the topic again.

    Have a great fucking Fourth of July….

    Sorry, I know it was tasteless, but I could not resist.

  • Free Good Boss, Bad Boss Webinar: Hosted By Rypple on July 8th

     Rypple is a company that sells "social software" that is designed to make giving (and getting) frequent feedback easier and more constructive.  They are hosting a free one hour webinar on Good Boss, Bad Boss. It will be on July 8th at 2:00 PM Eastern (or 11 AM Pacific).  I will talk about the main ideas in the book for 40 minutes or so and then we will open it up to Q&A.  Please go here to sign-up.

    I look forward to it, especially to your questions and comments.

  • “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, but thinking less about yourself.”

    Gina from Maestro Consulting Group posted the above saying in response to my post today over at HBR on "The Delicate Art of Being Perfectly Assertive."  I think it is a lovely and wise saying.  Indeed, it is a perfect companion to the "the attitude of wisdom," the ability to have the courage to act on what you know in concert with the ability to doubt what you know and do.  Gina, great stuff!