Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • A Talk On Fast Innovation, All In One Great Picture

    A couple weeks ago, I did a talk on "fast innovation" at IDEO.  I gave the talk from a powerpoint deck, but at the same time, while the audience and I discussed the the talk, there was a guy named Kevin Bain who does this thing called
    "graphics scribing."  On a single big piece of paper, he drew images and a few words that summarized the main points.  This is the the third or fourth time I have worked with one of these scribes.  When they are good, like Kevin is, the interaction with the audience unfolds in an interesting and better way than a standard talk.  You see the main points unfolding all on one piece of paper, every now and then the scribe will stop and summarize what he or she has been recording so the group gets a sense of where it has been, and at the end, you've got a cool summary of the talk for the group that is all on one place. 

    It is hard to see the details of the picture below, but if you click on it, you can see a bigger version that is easy to read. Regular readers of this blog and my books will recognize some of my standard themes, like creativity being about doing new things with old things, small wins, and the smart-talk trap.  But I have never seen them put together quite like this, and while "you had to be there" to understand the full context, I am still rather amazed and humbled what a great job he did summarizing core ideas that have taken years for my co-authors and me to develop.  Kevin's website is here if you want to see a few more samples and to contact him about his "graphic facilitation" services.

     

    Bob sutton_innovation_scribing

  • Horrible Bosses and Revenge: The Uncut Version

    I had a little piece published today in the Financial Times called "Revenge Can Be Sweet for Smart Workers."  Follow the link if you want to read the article (you need to register, but it is free).  I have been doing a lot of interviews and such lately about Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule as both books are related to the new comedy Horrible Bosses, but the Financial Times is the only place where I have done an original piece.  I found the editors at the FT to be wonderful, far better than most I work with to be blunt (although no one beats Julia Kirby at Harvard Business Review). Nontheless, given space restrictions, the editors cut several hundred words out of my original piece, so I thought I would put the "uncut" version here.  Like most films that are "director's cuts," the shorter version is probably better.  But I hope you might like the long one too:

    The new hit movie, Horrible Bosses, provides a satisfying if rather shallow dose of guilty pleasure for just about anyone who has endured a nasty and incompetent superior.  The three hapless protagonists, played by Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis, hatch a plot to murder their cruel overseers.  Their plans fail miserably, but they (sort of) win in the end anyway.   Horrible Bosses, like any decent comedy, is both logically absurd and emotionally truthful.  Plotting to murder your boss, let alone trying to do it, is immoral, unlawful, and impractical.  And while people may love hearing and telling stories about dramatic acts of revenge short of murder, this approach usually backfires.  The audience in my theatre laughed and laughed when the cruel dentist played by Jennifer Aniston, a heartless sexual harasser, was filmed stripping-off an anesthetized patient’s pants by her long-suffering dental assistant – who used the incriminating evidence to force Aniston to pay for his honeymoon.

    Unfortunately, real-life victims who live-out their revenge fantasies rarely fare so well.  Since publishing The No Asshole Rule in 2007, I have been told and emailed a steady stream of “getting even” stories from victims of lousy bosses.  My readers especially like the story I heard from a radio producer whose relentlessly demeaning boss kept stealing food off her desk. She got even by cooking brownies that contained Ex-Lax, the chocolate laxative, and placing them prominently on her desk.  Her boss promptly gobbled them down (without asking permission, of course). She waited an hour or so before telling him the ingredients.  Like most dramatic and entertaining revenge stories, it did not end well for the victim in real life.  The boss stopped eating her food, but he turned even nastier in other ways — browbeating her and giving her time-consuming, boring, and useless assignments. So the producer quit, even though she did not have another job lined up. The problem with revenge, as this story hints, is that all too often it fuels a vicious circle – and because bosses have more power than their underlings, they typically inflict the greater damage.

    Yet the impulse to exact revenge that fuels Horrible Bosses is not only a potent and widely felt emotion, it has helped bring down many managers who have fallen prey to power poisoning.   The actions by the three awful bosses in the film were cartoonish, but all suffered symptoms identified by psychologists who study the perils of power: They were self-absorbed, greedy, lacked impulse control, insensitive to subordinates feelings, and acted like the rules applied to everyone but them.  When the Kevin Spacey character gave himself a promotion and knocked down walls to reward himself with an even bigger office, it didn’t seem like fiction to me.  It reminded me of real bosses who had done similar things and how, just like the Kevin Spacey character, they were oblivious to the resentment it fueled among employees who felt that the boss already had enough money, power, and related goodies.

    Yes, it stinks to work for one of these creeps, as millions of victims of bully bosses can tell you.  Fortunately, although enacting revenge fantasies is a recipe for self-destruction, smart employees who are unable or unwilling to escape such jerks battle back via less dramatic and more effective steps.  They patiently document every cruel word (like the nurse who counted how often a surgeon said she was “chubby”), every hostile move (like the TV producer whose boss flicked a lit cigarette at her during a contentious meeting), and every unethical or incompetent act (like the executive secretary who kept records of every suspect travel expense claimed by her boss).  They band together with fellow victims so the documentation comes from multiple sources.   That way, when they do go to battle, they have a stronger case and can’t be portrayed as a single nut case.  Above all, smart victims are patient. They build an iron-clad case and a large group of allies.  And they wait for the right moment to strike back – after stretch of poor job performance by the boss, a widely known ethical lapse, or perhaps best of all, after the boss’s superiors have started asking around because they have their own concerns about that boss.   The top management team of one U.S. nonprofit organization did this rather masterfully.  As a member of the team explained to me, the board of directors was initially unresponsive to concerns raised by an individual staff member about their two-faced executive director.  This boss was apparently unusually adept at kissing-up to the board and kicking-down at those she led.  The team members patiently built their case and waited for the right moment – which came after a board member ran into a couple former staff members and was horrified by the stories he heard.  When the board  brought in the full management team (minus the executive director), the team presented extensive documentation against their boss and, as group, threatened to resign unless the bully was fired – which the board voted to do later that day.

    The lesson for victims of nasty and incompetent bosses is that, if you can’t or won’t flee from your vile overseers, and want to get even, having revenge fantasies is probably inevitable.  But acting on such fantasies is probably a bad idea for you — even though doing so (sort of) worked for the three underlings in Horrible Bosses.  Your boss has a lot more power than you do.  So you’ve got to build your case, develop allies, and wait to fight back when your boss turns vulnerable.  

    Nonetheless, putting all the silliness and impracticalities aside, Horrible Bosses offers a useful cautionary tale for every manager and executive.  If you treat your people like dirt, just because they comply with your absurd requests and smile sweetly through your insults and tantrums does not mean that all is well.  Your charges just might be waiting oh-so-patiently for you to slip-up or for your past sins to catch-up with you.  Then your followers will pounce and you will be in a world of hurt.   Certainly, there are plenty of nasty and incompetent bosses out there who escape unscathed – the world is not perfectly just place.  But if you are a horrible boss, and you lead some smart and patient people, the revenge the exact against you may, in the end, be just as sweet for them as any Hollywood fantasy.

  • New York City Halts Teacher Bonus Program: Another Blow to Evidence-Resistant Ideology

    The New York Times reports that the school system has abandoned their teacher bonus system because it is ineffective. I quote:

    A New York City program that distributed $56 million in performance bonuses to teachers and other school staff members over the last three years will be permanently discontinued, the city Department of Education said on Sunday. The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes toward their jobs.

    The research appears to be quite careful and the RAND Corporation is highly respected:

    The study, commissioned by the city, is to be published Monday by the RAND Corporation, the public policy research institution. It compared the performance of the approximately 200 city schools that participated in the bonus program with that of a control group of schools. Weighing surveys, interviews and statistics, the study found that the bonus program had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.  “We did not find improvements in student achievement at any of the grade levels,” said Julie A. Marsh, the report’s lead researcher and a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. “A lot of the principals and teachers saw the bonuses as a recognition and reward, as icing on the cake. But it’s not necessarily something that motivated them to change.”

    Are you surprised? I am not, and if the people running the New York City school system had actually read a large body of existing research, they would never have wasted all this money in the first place. In our opening chapter of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, Jeff Pfeffer and I reviewed the extensive literature on the links between incentives and teacher performance, and it turns out that although there always have been people with great faith in pay for performance systems for teachers — going back to at least 1918 — careful studies show over and over again that they do not improve student performance.  The New York Times article suggests that despite the ideology supporting pay for performance systems, there is growing evidence that the current round of incentive-based teacher pay isn't working — just as it never had worked:

    The results add to a growing body of evidence nationally that so-called pay-for-performance bonuses for teachers that consist only of financial incentives have no effect on student achievement, the researchers wrote. Even so, federal education policy champions the concept, and spending on performance-based pay for teachers grew to $439 million nationally last year from $99 million in 2006, the study said.

    To be clear, pay for performance schemes do appear to have some effects in schools — most of which are bad. One of the most well-documented (see this post on findings in Freakomomics and related research) is that some teachers and administrators start cheating when their pay is linked to performance on student's standardized tests.  Their are strong hints that this is exactly what happened in Washington, D.C. and other cities where financial incentives for teachers and administrators are linked to student test scores. 

    Note that I am not arguing against pay for performance systems in general.  They work in other settings –sports, sales, lots of other places,as we show in Hard Facts.  But they don't work for teachers for a host of reasons, perhaps paramount among them are that teachers rarely have enough control over key student behaviors before, during, and outside of class, over class composition (and when they do, they sometimes use it to cheat the tests.. such as by sending poor perfomers to special education classes), and over other resources they need to have a strong enough impact on student learning.   Also, giving students a test once a year probably isn't a very good way to measure what students are learning.  As The New York Times report argues, another problem with pay for performance schemes is that it turns teachers' attention away from intrinsic rewards (the reason most go into the profession in the first place) and toward extrinsic rewards (See Dan Pink's Drive to learn more about the trouble with extrinsic rewards). 

    To be clear, I am NOT a general supporter of the policies of teacher's unions.  Although I do think that way too much blame and way too little credit is given to teachers, I do have an evidence-based pet peeve against how vehemently teacher's union's defend the jobs of bad apples, the rotten and incompetent teachers.  This argument is consistent with the work on "Bad is stronger than good" that I've discussed here before… while it is tough for even a good teacher to overcome a lousy system and have strong positive impact on students, it is pretty clear that really lousy teachers can make a bad system worse, and dampen the positive effects of a good one.   I believe that if unions changed policy here and became even more vehement about reforming and removing bad teachers than their critics it would improve their reputations and the quality of education — and earn them political capital to battle lousy policies such as tying teacher pay to student test performance.  (See this great discussion and debate at The New York Times).

    To return the dismal record of pay for performance systems in schools, some years back, I had an interesting conversation with Tony Bryk, a prestigious educational researcher who is now heads the Carnegie Foundation.  We were were at a think tank, a place called the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and I asked Tony why — even though there is so much evidence against practices like pay for performance for teachers — they remain popular and come back in waves… until overwhelming evidence emerges again that in fact they are bad.  Tony suggested two reasons.  The first has to do with ideology — that people hold some assumptions so strongly (like economics and business minded folks who believe that incentives are the best answer to changing any kind of human behavior) that they refuse to accept any evidence that runs counter to their beliefs — no matter how strong those findings might be.  The second reason was what Tony called "collective amnesia."  He argued that, in the history of educational policy, the same bad ideas seem to come around every 10 or 20 years, and policy makers and their staffs either don't remember or make no effort to dig-up relevant research to guide their decisions, regardless of their ideologies.  In the case of pay for performance, it appears that both of these factors are operating. 

    Practicing evidence-based management isn't easy given our various human flaws.  But we sure could save a lot of money, a lot of heartache, and make people's lives a lot better if we all tried a lot harder to do it.  There are plenty of outcomes in life that are impossible to predict.  Unfortunately, what happened in New York was completely predictable, even if people with blind faith in linking test scores to financial rewards for schools and teachers remain unwilling to believe this well-established truth now. 

    P.S. A comment below suggests that some recent studies do show a positive effect of financial rewards on student performance.  My reading of the Rand Report suggests that for studies done in the U.S. there are a a few studies that show a positive impact, but the weight of the evidence supports the historical pattern of no effects or negative effects.  The more rigorous studies in particular find no ot weak effects on test scores, and little effect on teacher motivation, although there is some evidence that teachers devote more evidence to teaching to the test and less to teaching other things (not a surprise).  There is also some evidence that teacher cooperation goes down a bit and evidence that teachers game the system more to boost test scores.   A researcher from Chicago explained to me that in the schools she was studying (this was about 10 years ago) that scores were going up but she believed that it was not so much because incentives motivated teachers to work harder, but because it motivated them to get rid of their weakest students (often by sending them to special ed classes) and to refuse to "skip" gifted students because they pumped-up the average test scores in a class.  Finally, the most obvious effects of pressure on teachers and administrators to pump up test scores is cheating on the tests (by the teachers and administrators), as we have seen from evidence from Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, and just today, a probe started into cheating at schools in New Jersey.

    I am not rejecting the value of financial rewards as motivational tools for teachers outright, and it does appear that there are some special conditions under which they may be of some value. But the weight of the evidence suggests that most of the money spent on such incentives could have been to better use, that the ideological support for them is much stronger than than the evidence in support, and that one of the most consistent effects is bad — teachers and administrators cheat either to get the incentives or because they fear losing their jobs.

    This is my conclusion. You may reach a different one.  Here is a link to the 300 page Rand study of the failed New York program, which contains an excellent and very current review of the research.

  • Is Your Future Boss Horrible? A 10 Point Reference Check

    The film Horrible Bosses  opens on July 8th.  The basic plot, as I understand it, is that three guys who hate their bosses, played by  Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, conspire to murder them.  I don't recommend that way of dealing with a bosshole, and have been suggesting more constructive approaches (see this ABC interview).  As part of the film's release, I have been getting quite a few media calls about bosses. This reminded me of a checklist that I worked on with the folks at LinkedIn and Guy Kawasaki a few years back to help  assesses if a prospective boss is likely to be an asshole.   The list builds on the ideas in The No Asshole Rule and some ideas that appeared in Good Boss, Bad Boss.   

    We developed ten "reference check"  questions that you can ask people who have worked with and for your prospective boss — or perhaps had him or her as a client — to help determine if you are at risk of going to work for an asshole.

    Discovering the answers to these questions before you take a job can save you a lot of heartache. One of the key points in The No Asshole Rule is that one of the most effective ways to avoid being harmed by assholes — and becoming one yourself — is (to steal a phrase from Leonardo da Vinci) "to resist at the beginning," to avoid working for an asshole boss (or joining an asshole infested workplace) in the first place.  Here is our 10 point checklist:

    1. Kisses-up and kicks-down: “How does the prospective boss respond to feedback from people higher in rank and lower in rank?” “Can you provide examples from experience?” One characteristic of certified assholes is that they tend to demean those who are less powerful while brown-nosing their superiors.

    2. Can’t take it: “Does the prospective boss accept criticism or blame when the going gets tough?” Be wary of people who constantly dish out criticism but can’t take a healthy dose themselves.        

    3. Short fuse    : “In what situations have you seen the prospective boss lose his temper?” Sometimes anger is justified or even effective when used sparingly, but someone who “shoots-the-messenger” too often can breed a climate of fear in the workplace. Are co-workers scared of getting in an elevator with this person?  

    4. Bad credit: “Which style best describes the prospective boss: gives out gratuitous credit, assigns credit where credit is due, or believes everyone should be their own champion?” This question opens the door to discuss whether or not someone tends to take a lot of credit while not recognizing the work of his or her team.

    5. Canker sore: “What do past collaborators say about working with the prospective boss?” Assholes usually have a history of infecting teams with nasty and dysfunctional conflict. The world seems willing to tolerate talented assholes, but that doesn’t mean you have to.              

    6. Flamer: What kind of email sender is the prospective boss? Most assholes cannot contain themselves when it comes to email: flaming people, carbon-copying the world, blind carbon copying to cover his own buttocks. Email etiquette is a window into one’s soul.

    7. Downer: “What types of people find it difficult to work with the prospective boss? What type of people seem to work very well with the prospective boss?” Pay attention to responses that suggest “strong-willed” or “self-motivated” people tend to work best with the prospective boss because assholes tend to leave people around them feeling de-energized and deflated.

    8. Card shark: “Does the prospective boss share information for everyone’s benefit?” A tendency to hold cards close to one’s chest—i.e., a reluctance to share information—is a sign that this person treats co-workers as competitors who must be defeated so he or she can get ahead.                    

    9. Army of one: “Would people pick the prospective boss for their team?” Sometimes there is upside to having an asshole on your team, but that won’t matter if the coworkers refuse to work with that person. Use this question to help determine if the benefit of having the prospective boss on your team outweighs any asshole behaviors.

    10. Open architecture: “How would the prospective boss respond if a copy of The No Asshole Rule appeared on her desk?” Be careful if the answer is, “Duck!”

    Those are our 10 questions. I would love to hear other tips about what has helped you avoid taking a job with an asshole boss — or warning signs that you wish you would have noticed before going to work for a demeaning creep.   

  • A Rough But Intriguing Metric for School Assessing a School Principal

    Yesterday, I did an interview for the BAM network on Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The content expert on line was Justin Snider, who teaches at Columbia and has in-depth knowledge about K-12 schools, as that was the focus of the conversation.  Justin had great questions and comments about bosses in general (see this recent post) and about school principals in particular.  I thought he made especially good comments about how the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents. He especially suggested that school principals think about where their offices are located.. are they in a place that essentially requires them to keep bumping into teachers and parents, or are they in some corner of campus that reduces the amount of interaction.

    I like Justin's point about the office because it reminds me of the design for Pixar's building in Emeryville, which was inspired by Steve Jobs' assertion that they needed to make sure that everyone was basically forced to bump into each other as a result of the placement of the food and bathrooms.  At one point, Jobs half-seriously suggested that there be just one central bathroom so that everyone had to run into everyone else and there would be a lot of random encounters as people walked to and from that crucial location. The ultimate design resulted in more than one bathroom , but the food and bathrooms were located so that people need to walk through this central area constantly — one of those little things that has helped fuel Pixar's creativity over the years.

    After the interview, Justin and I exchanged emails,  I told him a story about how I saw the difference between the impact of a good versus a bad principal at my daughter's middle school, how there was a great principal who seemed to know every students name and was widely loved.   He retired and was replaced by a bad one who seemed to not know any student's name and was so out of touch that his lack of soul and other more objective acts of incompetence provoked widespread despair among students and parents, and quite a few teachers complained about his lousy leadership openly.    I was reminded of this difference between the two principals just a few weeks ago when, even though it is has been a few years since the good boss last saw my daughter, he greeted her by name in a local restaurant. In contrast, my daughter is still annoyed that the bad one mispronounced so many student names, including hers, at graduation (Her name is "Eve," he called her something that sounded like "Ev.")

    Justin had an interesting reaction to my little story:

    Actually, right after our call concluded, I realized I should have said that a great back-of-the-envelope measure of whether a principal is generally doing a good job is how many students' names he or she knows.  In my experience, there's a strong correlation between principals who know almost all students by name and those who are respected (and seen as effective) by students, parents and teachers.  It's not a perfect measure, of course, but I think it's probably a fairly good indicator of a school's climate and a leader's effectiveness.

    I like Justin's observation.  Of course, some us are better at remembering names than others and we all have cognitive limits. But Justin's argument is compelling to me because knowing people's names seems like a good sign that a boss is directing attention to those he or she leads and is responsible for helping and is not overly focused on him or herself, or on kissing-up to the superintendent, board of education, or other superiors.

    What do you think of this metric?  Is it right for schools? What about other workplaces?

  • Indira Gandhi on Doing Work Versus Taking Credit For It

    I had a meeting today with my colleague Huggy Rao where we were batting around various ideas about systems that are effective versus ineffective at scaling good ideas. Huggy brought up this cool quite from Indira Gandhi:

    My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

    He then went on to argue that systems that bring-in, develop, and reward people in the first group  — and that expel, reform, and punish people in the second group — are likely to be more effective at spreading and implementing constructive action. Sounds right to me.

  • I’m on BNET’s “The Live One” Webcast Today

    I will be interviewed on BNET's new webcast show, "The Live One" today at 10AM pacific.  I plan to talk about Good Boss, Bad Boss and related stuff including Google's recent research differentiating their best and worst managers (technical skills didn't matter nearly as much as people skills, which surprised a lot of people at Google), a cool new study that shows having more women on your team will make it act smarter (in fact, it is more important than having people with higher IQ's), and the recent appearance of The No Asshole Rule in Doonesbury.  At least that is what I am planning on talking about.  It will be a fairly informal conversation, so who knows exactly what will happen.  I hope you can tune in.  Again, the URL is here — check out the past interviews, with people including Peter Sims and Penelope Trunk.

  • Taking The Path of Most Resistance: The Virtues

    I am blogging only intermittently as I am pretty focused on reading, talking to people, and generally fretting, worrying, and trying to structure the book on scaling constructive action that Huggy Rao and I are trying to write. I have been reading everything from psychological experiments on how different metaphors affect our perceptions and action, to studies of the mathematical and administrative challenges of scaling computer systems, to research on cities of different sizes (especially some interesting stuff that suggests bigger is better). But the area where scaling has been studied perhaps most directly is in  education, including studies of how to replicate great charter schools and how to substitute effective practices for ineffective practices in large school systems.  

    This weekend, I read an old (1993) but excellent study commissioned by the Casey foundation on what it takes comprehensive school reform in large school systems.  I was taken with its counter-intuitive title "The Path of Most Resistance"  (see the PDF here), in part, because it ran counter to some of the (evidence-based) assumptions that we have developed about scaling, including the notion that scaling depends on finding ways to simplify things and reduce cognitive load on people, and the notion that changes that are consistent with local cultures and traditions are easier to implement than those that run counter to embedded beliefs. 

    As I read the report, however, I realized that the authors agreed with some of these points, as they weren't arguing that leaders should TRY to make things harder on themselves, but rather, to do large scale change right, there argument was that a lot of very hard things need to get done.  They argued that taking the easy way out — expecting instant results; not taking the time to engage with parents, students, administrators, local politicians and other key crucial actors; doing it on the cheap; expecting everything to go smoothly–  and a host other "easy solutions  — simply weren't realistic or wise for would-be change agents. The examples of successful large scale change they examined all took pretty much the opposite approach — there was a lot of patience and a long term perspective, time was taken to involve major constituencies, lots of resources were devoted to the effort, and a host of other tactics that entailed doing things the hard way rather than the easy way. 

    More broadly, I think it is intriguing to use their title to flip assumptions about change.  Sometimes the tougher road is the better road, as people go in with a more realistic mindset, they are ready for setbacks,  and expect to spend the time and money necessary.  And, as an added bonus, any social psychologist will tell you that the more effort and sacrifice people make toward something, the more committed they will be to it.   Indeed, as I watch successful innovators — ranging from the teams we teach at Stanford's design school to Pixar's amazing journey — the most successful tend to have this "it is going to be tough, but I can and will do it" mindset.

    On the other hand, I think there is an important caveat, one the Jeff Pfeffer and I have written about in Hard Facts. One of the impediments to successful change is that people use the belief that "it is difficult and takes a long time" to avoid trying to make necessary changes at all.  Or, worse yet, they  propose a long-term change process, but only start working on it just before the "due date" — perhaps proposing a two-year project, but doing all the work in the final months (much like my students who, even though I assign a paper months in advance, don't start it until the night before).  In addition, there are many constructive changes that are not difficult and do not take a long time — such as changing small rules or procedures, experimenting with a new and delimited program, and so on.   Unfortunately, all too often, large scale change is slowed or stopped because people delay or fail to complete the array of small and easy steps required to accomplish any large change (In other words, they fail to focus on the daily small wins).

    Finally, there is an old but interesting lesson in creative thinking here, one consistent with the notion of "having strong opinions, weakly held."  The challenges of doing successful change look a lot different when you assume that "taking the path of least resistance" is best versus assuming that "taking the path of most resistance" is best.  Indeed, although they are pretty much exact opposites, you can learn a lot about change when you look for conditions under which each statement is true and false.  More generally, a good way to spark creativity is to take your most dearly held assumptions and ask "suppose the opposite were true?"

     

  • Doonesbury Slaps Donald Trump With The No Asshole Rule

       Two frames
    My old buddy from graduate school, Larry Ford, sent me an email this morning and told me to check out Doonesbury.  To my amazement, it features The No Asshole Rule, or as they call it "The No A——- Rule."  Here is where you can go to see the complete cartoon. The cartoon does a great job of summarizing the main points of the book (see two frames above)  and then it goes on to use the ideas in the book to rip Donald Trump a new asshole (see below).

    Trimmed version Doonesbury donald
    In my book, Trump really does qualify as a certified asshole, as having achieved the lowest level a human can short of committing horrific crimes or something.  His narcissism is something to behold. Listen to how often he uses the word "I" when he speaks about the buildings built by his company. He says things like "I built the Trump International Hotel and Tower."  It sounds as if no one helped at all, it was all him, designing the building, putting it up, and so on.

    Trump also loves to sue people, as that is what a rich bully does.  And, as one lawyer I know well explained to me, there are an interesting group of people out there who sue others as a replacement for psychotherapy — The Donald appears to be of this twisted ilk.  In this vein, I was talking to a former editor of a rather famous publication a few months back and I asked him who was the biggest asshole he ever dealt with — it took less than a second for him to name Trump.  The editor then went on to tell me that, after his magazine published a piece on Trump, Trump called him and started screaming at him and told him that the lawsuit against the magazine was already being prepared. The former editor then asked Donald an interesting question: " Have you read the story?"  The Donald said "No."  After reading it, Trump decided not to sue. 

    A lovely human being, huh?

    Well, I never thought The No Asshole Rule would make Doonesbury. And given my intense dislike of The Donald, I am delighted with how it appeared.  Now, let's see if Trump already has his lawyers going after Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau because — after all, that is what rich certified asshole would do!

    P.S. This Doonesbury was apparently written before Trump withdrew from the race — although now The Donald seems to be backpeddling a bit, saying he wouldn't completely rule it out.

  • Get a Free PDF of My HBR Essay “Stepping Down Gracefully”

    I wrote a short essay for the June Harvard Business Review on why it is so important for leaders to step down gracefully, whether they are leaving voluntarily or not.  It was inspired by some leaders I know who have not stepped down gracefully, and in the process, have done moderate damage to their organizations and severe damage to their careers.  Here is how it opens:

    Some CEOs of long tenure must have gotten a slightly queasy feeling as they watched the recent events in the Arab world. Even if they bear no resemblance at all to Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Gadhafi—even if they are the most competent and benevolent of leaders—they may well feel horror at how rapidly the fortunes of a comfortable autocrat can disintegrate. They may wonder at the frightening human tendency, when the writing is on the wall, to resort to the denial, delusions, anger, and antics we’ve seen from despots in Africa and the Middle East.

    If you would like a free PDF of this little essay, you can find get it here: https://archive.harvardbusiness.org/cla/web/pl/product.seam?c=11746&i=11748&cs=1e30763be64402b7a624de281722f66b.  They only give 100 free ones so, when they are gone, they are gone. 

    P.S. Please forgive my lack of new posts lately, I am focused on trying to get a new book started and have not been in the blogging mood!  I am hoping to start blogging a bit more soon, but can't predict my mood or motivation very well.