Work Matters

Category: Evidence-based Management

  • The Asshole Survival Guide: My Latest Book

    Sutton.alkaseltzer

    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. 

  • Scaling Up Excellence: The Problem of More

    This is reprinted from the Harvard Business Review site. A big thanks to Julia Kirby for the wonderful editing.

    Start talking about the challenge of “scaling” with people, and you’ll find the term gets used to mean a lot of different things. For example, when entrepreneurs talk about it, they are usually struggling with matters of organization. Take Citrus Lane CEO Mauria Finley, whose company was experiencing some growing pains, appropriately enough; the startup sends monthly packages of great baby products to moms. After raising $5.1 million in capital in 2012, it grew from 6 to 20 employees.

    Back in 2011, in Citrus Lane’s first six months, its small founding team worked in a house and ate lunch together every day around a big table. Any problem or opportunity that arose was dealt with right then and there, lest misunderstandings fester or business prospects slip away. Growing to 20 people working in a more traditional office setting did not strike anyone as extreme change, yet the team found it had to work a lot harder to unearth problems and opportunities. Even more tricky, they had to learn to articulate something that had been tacit: a shared understanding of goals, culture, and what it takes to succeed at Citrus Lane. Today, they constantly remind each other to spend time with newcomers and, as Finley emphasized, not just tell them these things when they are hired or remind them a few times. The scaled-up organization needs to hear about what matters most at Citrus Lane over and over, to live these beliefs every day, and to observe her and other leaders living them, as well. Deliberate effort is required because “it isn’t something that just happens naturally at lunch every day any longer. We are too big now.”

    A growing employee base represents one type of scaling challenge. Since my Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I decided several years ago to study scaling (it’s the topic of our forthcoming book Scaling Up Excellence), we have heard about many others – so many that we thought, early on, that we might need to put a finer point on which form we hoped to shed light on.

    For example, when leaders of much larger organizations talk about scaling, they’re often talking about something more akin to replication. In a 2001 interview with HBR, UPS’s then CEO Jim Kelly described the growth of the company: “For decades, we’ve been able to grow tremendously simply by expanding our core business geographically. Really, UPS’s first 75 years was spent expanding across the United States: first to 13 states, then to nine additional states, and so forth. We just took our core delivery business and applied for rights in different states.” Today that kind of marketplace scaling often means a more complicated process of global expansion– such as IKEA’s opening stores in China, or Home Depot’s failed efforts to do so.

    And then there are the organizational leaders who use the term scaling to describe their desire to find pockets of excellence in behaviors and beliefs in the organization and spread them further – a different challenge than adding new people and locations. We studied how Wyeth, the large Pharmaceutical firm (now part of Pfizer) made dramatic improvements in cost and quality across its manufacturing operation. It first created pockets of excellence in a few small teams in each of eight plants (calling them “mini-transformations”) and then relied on mentoring and coaching to spread the superior practices throughout each plant, from one team to the next.

    Still another variation on scaling is when better practices are transferred across networks of organizations. Between 2004 and 2006, for example, a Boston-based nonprofit called the Institute for Health Improvement led an effort called the “100,000 Lives Campaign” to raise awareness in U.S. hospitals of the importance of some simple practices (e.g., more frequent and thorough hand-washing) in reducing infection rates. Ultimately, some 3200 hospitals comprising over 70% of U.S. beds participated in the Campaign. There is compelling evidence (including analysis done by members of a Stanford doctoral seminar that Huggy Rao ran about five years ago) that the number of preventable deaths in U.S dropped by about 120,000 during this period. (Other factors probably contributed to that decrease, but the Campaign clearly played a large role.)

    In each of these situations, “scaling” refers to something different. But as we dug deeper into these and other cases, academic studies, and stories, we realized what they shared. Scaling challenges nearly always come down to the same problem: the difficulty of spreading something good from those who have it to those that don’t – or at least don’t yet. It is always, in other words, the problem of more.

    Finley and her team face the problem of more – and the success of her growing organization depends on solving it. The need for more of what was working well also challenged Wyeth, IKEA, and the Institute for Health Improvement. Have their successful efforts come from the same mold in terms of what they are spreading and by what method? No – and yet, we are finding a great deal of commonality in the obstacles that arise and the decisions that must be made. We’ve discovered guiding principles that turn out to apply as other leaders and teams go about building and uncovering pockets of exemplary performance, and spreading those splendid deeds.

    Sometimes the way to learn more about a subject is to focus in more tightly and become more precise in one’s use of language. But sometimes the challenge itself is big enough – like the basic problem of spreading something good to more people and places without screwing up – that it doesn’t help to narrow its definition. Sometimes, even with the use of a word, it’s better to scale it up

  • 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.

  • An Evidence-Based Temper Tantrum Topples The Local Asshole

    About 15 years ago, UC Berkeley's Barry Staw
    and I had a running conversation about the conditions under which
    showing anger, even having a temper tantrum, is strategic versus
    something that undermines a person's reputation and influence, and for
    leaders, the performance of their teams and organizations.  In fact,
    Barry eventually collected some amazing in-the-locker room half-time
    speeches for basketball coaches that he is currently  working on writing
    and publishing. 

    I thought of those old conversations when I got
    this amazing note the other day (this is the same one that inspired me
    to do my last post on the Atilla the Manager cartoon):

    I just discovered your work via Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist. I had an
    asshole boss until I got her fired. For 6 years I was abused and I should have
    done what you say and got out as soon as I could. But you get comfortable and
    used to the abuse. You even think you are successfully managing the abusers
    behavior with your behavior. Ridiculous I know. I suffered everything you
    mentioned including depression, anxiety and just plain unhappiness. The day I
    snapped, I used the "I quit and I'm taking you down with me" tactic.
    I did document the abuse even though just like every asshole situation, everyone
    knew she was an abuser. In an impassioned meeting I let top management know
    exactly why I was quitting, let them know they are culpable for all the mental
    anquish and turnover and poor results stemming from the asshole. They probably
    thought I was a madman with nothing left to lose and about to sue and defame
    the company (they'd have been correct). Two hours later she was walked out. Now
    the department is doing great and actually producing instead of trying to
    manage the reactions of a lunatic.

    I am taken with this note for
    numerous reasons.  For starters, I am always delighted when the victim
    of an asshole finds a successful way to to fight back.  I am also
    pleased to see  that, as happens so often, once this creep was sent
    packing, people could stop spending their days trying to deal with her
    antics and instead could devote their energies to doing their jobs well.
    And in thinking about it in more detail — and thinking back to those
    old conversations with Barry — I believe that showing anger was
    effective in this situation for at least three reasons.

    1. He was right.
    This was, as the headline says, an evidence-based temper tantrum. 
    Although his superiors may have not been overly pleased with how he
    delivered the news, he apparently had darn good evidence that this
    person was an asshole and doing harm to him and his co-workers. Facts
    matter, even when emotions flare.

    2. His anger was a reflection of how others felt, not just his particular quirks and flaws. 
    This outpouring of anger and the ultimatum he gave were seen as giving
    voice to how everyone who worked with this "lunatic" felt.  It was his
    tantrum, but it was on behalf of and gave voice to others.  In such
    situations, when a person is not seen as out of touch reality or crazy,
    even though he may have felt or even acted like a "madman" for the
    moment, the anger and refusal to give in can be very powerful.  I also
    suspect that, in this case, those same bosses who fired him felt he same
    way about the local asshole, and his anger propelled them to take an
    action they knew was the right thing to do. The notion that emotions are
    contagious and propel action is quite well established in a lot of
    studies (see research by Elaine Hatfield for example). 

    3. The was a rare tantrum. 
    This follows from the last point.  If you are always ranting and
    yelling and making threats, people aren't likely to take you
    seriously.   Tantrums are effective when they are seen as a rare and
    justified outburst rather than a personal characteristic — as something
    that is more easily attributed to the bad situation the person is in
    rather than personal weakness or style.

    Please, please don't use
    this fellow's success as a reason to start yelling and making threats
    and all that.  That is what a certified asshole would do.  But — while
    such outbursts are not always the product of rational planning — this
    little episode provides instructive guidance about when expressing anger
    might produce outcomes for the greater good.  It also provides some
    interesting hints about when it is best to try to stop outbursts from
    those you are close to versus when egging them on is a reasonable thing
    to do.

    Finally, a big thanks to the anonymous writer of this note.  I learned something from it and I hope that other do as well.

    P.S. This note and post makes me think that some revision to my list of Tips for Surviving Workplace Assholes might be in order.

  • John Gardner on What a University Ought to Stand For

    I spent the morning trying to catch-up on all the emails that have been piling-up and the stuff I have been collecting to read for the book we are are writing on scaling-up excellence. Huggy Rao and I spent the week as co-directors of an executive program called Customer-Focused Innovation. We had great fun and learned an enormous amount from the 65 executives who participated in blend of traditional classroom education (we call it the "clean models" part) and d.school experiential education — project with JetBlue aimed at bringing more "humanity" to air travel for their customers (we call this the "dirty hands" part).

    The program appears to be a big success (participants rated it 4.87 on a 5-point "willingness to recommend" scale). But after all those logistics and all that social ramble, I am delighted to have a quiet day.
    I wasn't planning on doing a post, but I couldn't resist sharing the opening of an article by the amazing Karl Weick, one of the most imaginative people in my field.

    Karl started out his 2002 British Journal of Management on "Puzzles in Organizational Learning: An Exercise in Disciplined Imagination" this way:

    It is sometimes possible to explore basic questions in the university that are tough to raise in other settings. John Gardner (1968, p. 90) put it well when he said that the university stands for:

    • things that are forgotten in the heat of battle

    •values that get pushed aside in the rough and tumble of everyday living

    • the goals we ought to be thinking about and never do

    • the facts we don’t like to face

    • the questions we lack the courage to ask

    I read that list over and over. As you may know, the late John Gardner was one of the most thoughtful leadership "gurus" who ever lived and so much more. As a university professor, this reminded me of why my colleagues and I — at our best, we all screw-up at times — do certain things that annoy, surprise, and — now and then — actually help people. We feel obligated to take years trying to figure out the answers to questions that seem pretty simple on the surface. We study obscure things that seem trivial or at least not very important right now. We feel obligated to go with the best evidence even when we don't like answer (e.g., the recent Stanford study that shows there is little or no documented health advantage to organic food isn't something I want to hear, but it is so carefully done that I accept it as the provisionally true). We also feel obligated to ask questions of ourselves at others that can be quite unpleasant for everyone.

    I think of my colleague Jeff Pfeffer in particular here, who throughout his whole career, has raised questions about everything from the overblown effects of leadership, to the ways that focusing on money turns us greedy and selfish, to his current work on how organizations and workplaces can make us ill and cause us to die premature deaths. Jeff has made a lot of people squirm people over the years, including me, but he is doing exactly what John Gardner asserted that  a good professor ought to do — seek and tell the truth, even when it is hard to take.

    As has happened so many times throughout the nearly 30 years I have been a university professor, Karl Weick (with a big assist from John Gardner this time) has reminded me yet again of what is important in my line of work and the standards I should try to follow. 

  • Brandi Chastain’s Advice on Incentives and Cooperation

    As regular readers of this blog may recall, my wife — Marina Park — is the CEO of the Girl Scouts of Northern California.  It has been a busy year from Marina and her staff because it is the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the Girl Scouts and there have been many celebrations.  There was an especially wild one called 100 Hundred, Fun Hundred where some 24,000 girls gathered at the Alameda County Fair Grounds to camp and engage in activities ranging from rock climbing, to scuba diving, to dancing to roakc bands.  You can read about the various celebrations here on their website.  

    Today, I am focusing on the Forever Green Awards — a series of dinners that have been held throughout Northern California to honor women who "have made a significant impact to sustaining the environment, economy, or community."  I have been three of the eight award dinners now and have been inspired by many of these women (here is the complete list), from opera soprano Katherine Jolly, to Jane Shaw the Chairman of the Board at Intel, to Amelia Ceja — the Owner & President Ceja Vineyards. 

    I  heard something last week at the dinner in Menlo Park that especially caught my ear — from none other than Brandi Chastain, the Olympic Women's Soccer gold medal winner and world champion, who still plays soccer seriously and now often works as a sports broadcaster for ABC and ESPN.  Of course, Chastain we always be remembered for throwing off her jersey after scoring the winning goal at the Women's World Championships in 1999 — in 2004 she wrote a book called "Its Not About the Bra."

    The award winners at Menlo Park were each asked to describe the best advice they ever received.  Brandi began by talking about her grandfather and how crucial he was to her development as a soccer player and a person.  Brandi said that he had a little reward system where she was paid $1.00 for scoring a goal but $1.50 for an assist — because, as she put it, "it is better to give than receive."

    I love that on so many levels.  I helped coach girls soccer teams for some years, and getting the star players to pass was often tough.  And moving into the world of organizations, as Jeff Pfeffer and I have been arguing for years, too many organizations create dysfunctional internal competition by saying they want cooperation but behaving in ways that promote selfish behavior.  Chastain's grandfather applied a simple principle that can be used in even the most sophisticated reward systems — one that I have seen used to good effect in places ranging from General Electric, to IDEO, to McKinsey. 

    P.S. The last Forever Green Awards will be in Santa Rosa at the Paradise Ridge Winery.  Click here if you want to learn more.

  • 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.

  • Too Big to Fail, Economies of Scale, Cities, and Companies

    I've been reading research on organizational size and performance as it is pertinent to the book that Huggy Rao and I are writing on scaling-up excellence.  In doing so, I also have been following the debate about banks and whether the assertion that both a cause of the meltdown and a risk for future fiascoes is that banks are "too big to fail."   Of course, the debate is hard to sift through because there is so much ideology and so many perverse incentives (example: the bigger the bank, the more the CEO, top team, and board will — in general — be compensated). 

    Although bankers have been generally silent on this, some have started speaking-up since former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weil — the creator of that huge bank (which lives on courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers) — joined the chorus and argued that big banks ought to be broken-up.   Simon Johnson — an MIT professor — had an interesting editorial in the New York Times yesterday where he reviews some of the recent arguments by bankers and lobbying groups that very big banks are still a good idea — and refutes their arguments (and points out that both Democrats and more recently Republicans are starting to challenge the wisdom of mega-banks). 

    I especially want to focus on the "economies of scale argument," that there are more efficiencies and other advantages enjoyed by larger systems in comparison to smaller ones. This appears to be the crux of an editorial in defense of large banks published in the NYT on August 22nd by former banking executive William B. Harrison Jr.   I was struck by one of Johnson's retorts:

    As I made clear in a point-by-point rebuttal
    of Mr. Harrison’s Op-Ed commentary, his defense of the big banks is not
    based on any evidence. He primarily makes assertions about economies of
    scale in banking, but no one can find such efficiency enhancements for
    banks with more than $100 billion in total assets – and our largest
    banks have balance sheets, properly measured, that approach $4 trillion.

    Although I am interested in — and an advocate — of the power of growing bigger and better organizations at times, doing so is only justifiable in my view if excellence can at least be sustained and preferably enhanced, and the side-effects and risks to do not overwhelm the benefits.  Unfortunately, the optimism among the bigger is better crowd often outruns the facts.  For starters, I would love to see sound evidence that really really big organizations enjoy economies of scale and other performance advantages — Wal-Mart might be such a case, they certainly have market power, the ability to bring down prices, and brand recognition  — but I can't find much systematic evidence for economies of scale across really big organizations.  If Mr. Harrison is correct, for example, there isn't any evidence of increased efficiencies for banks over 100 billion in assets.

    This debate reminds me of some fascinating research on the differences between cities and companies. Luis Bettencourt and Geoffery West of the Santa Fe Institute present fascinating evidence that larger cities are more efficient and effective than smaller ones.  As they conclude in this article in Nature:

    Three main characteristics vary systematically with population. One, the space required per capita shrinks, thanks to denser settlement and a more intense use of infrastructure. Two, the pace of all socioeconomic activity accelerates, leading to higher productivity. And three, economic and social activities diversify and become more interdependent, resulting in new forms of economic specialization and cultural expression. We have recently shown that these general trends can be expressed as simple mathematical ‘laws’. For example, doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations.

    OK, so it seems that economies of scale do exist for at least one kind of social system, cities.  Does this provide hope for those bankers?  Apparently not. Check out West's Ted Talk on "The Surprising Math Cities and Corporations."  He concludes several interesting things about scaling. First, the bigger the biological system, the more efficient it becomes. Second, following the above quote and the logic that follows from organisms, cities become more efficient (and creative and financially successful too) as they become larger.  Third, that cities rarely die, but organizations almost always do (he claims always).  Fourth, he shows that companies do scale — in fact he talks about Wal-Mart, shows their economies of scale,  and describes his dataset of 23,000 companies. But the twist is that as companies become larger and older they become weighted down with bureaucracy and — unlike cities — the resulting internal friction both outweighs the benefits of economies of scale and renders them unable to to pull-off the radical innovations required to stay alive. 

    Here is this conclusion in more detail, from an article in The New York Times:

    This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting?
    After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies,
    Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike
    urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees
    grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when
    he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he
    says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects
    the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale
    are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a
    company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then,
    if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and
    rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so
    all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the
    beginning of the end.”

    The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per
    employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market
    volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff —
    overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to
    significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their
    need to keep on getting bigger.”

    There are still advantages to size despite these rather discouraging data: market power, legitimacy, the ability to do complex things that require multiple disciplines, and brand recognition come to mind.   And there are studies by economists that show economies of scale help under some conditions.  Some organizations are also better than others at limiting the burdens of bureaucracy as they grow– Wal-Mart is one of them. 

    As a practical matter, when I think of Bettencourt and West's data and combine it with Ben Horowitz's amazing post on scaling, it appears his advice to "give ground grudgingly," to add as little structure and process as you can get away with given your organization's size and complexity, is even more sound than I originally thought.

    As with many researchers, West has a healthy ego and states his findings with more certainty than is probably warranted.  But these are — unlike the bankers — evidence-based statements, and when I combine them with what Huggy and I are learning about how hard scaling is to do well (there are big differences between companies that do it well versus badly), the lack of evidence for economies of scale in really big banks, and a system where the primary defenders of really big banks have strong incentives and weak evidence to support their positions, I am hoping that in a political season where my country seems hopelessly split on so many issues, perhaps this is one where both sides can come together and hold an evidence-based position.

  • 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.