Category: General

Dear Readers,

I stopped blogging here actively about 10 years ago. If you are interested in my newer work, check out bobsutton.net, my posts on LinkedIn, and on X/Twitter.  That said, there is still a lot of old stuff here you might find interesting. A good place to start is the list to the right of "15 Posts People LIke."  These days I am focused on a new book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, with my pay Huggy Rao. It took us a good seven years to write that thing, and we are enjoying talking to a lot of smart people about the idea, and now and then, helping them use the ideas to make their organizations a bit more productive, creative, and most of all, humane.  I am also having a lot of fun talking with my friends about my next writing project.  I am not sure what it will be, something short, soul authored, rather personal, and not as serious as my recent books. 

Thanks!  Bob Sutton

I was exchanging emails with a colleague that used to be at the Stanford d.school and now works with schools.  He menionted Brad Bird, which reminded my of an interview that Huggy Rao and I did with him in 2008 for the McKinsey Quarterly, just before he won his second Academy Award (for directing Ratatouille). 

It ended with a great quote that I just love:

Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.

 

A few years back, one of my closest friends at Stanford, Steve Barley, made a comment that I still think of often “If you are what you do, then I am a sociologist.”  Steve was making a general point (drawn from sociological theory on identity) and a specific point about himself.  The general point was that the behavior that people display – regardless of their intentions and the claims they make to others – are the best indicator of both their sense of self and of how others see them.  The specific point was that, although Steve is an engineering professor and his doctorate is from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, because of the intellectual tools he uses day after day in his research – things like social network theory, ethnographic methods, and theories of the sociology of work and technology – he sees himself as a sociologist (and most other scholars do too).  

I have been thinking of Steve’s comment because, as I have looked back on the last year (and my last 30 years as a professor at Stanford), if you are what you do, then I am a writer.   Of course, how skilled a writer I am is for others to judge.   But if I look back over the past three years (especially September of 2012 through October of 2013) pretty much all I did most days was to work on the text of Scaling Up Excellence.  Of course, my co-author Huggy Rao was involved heavily.  We had daily discussions about the language, lessons, theory, examples, and flow.  And Huggy was constantly introducing new practices and examples, and wrote initial drafts of many parts of the book.  But as the book unfolded, our roles became clear: the final drafting and editing, and compulsive rounds of revision were mostly my job.   This was partly because I am a control freak, partly because this my sixth business book (Huggy’s past writing had focused mainly on academic writings), and –- to return to Steve Barley’s test –- I realized that I am happiest and feel most comfortable in my own skin when I am writing, reading a draft, re-writing it, or thinking about writing.

If you start with graduate school in the late 1970s, although I did other things necessary for writing peer reviewed articles – interviews, designing and collecting survey data, data analysis, meetings with co-authors, and reading related research – my main work activity for the last 35 years day after day has been writing. What I wrote changed as I moved from being a doctoral student, to assistant professor working to get tenure, to mid-career researcher, to, now, as an academic who is mostly interested in applying academic rigor to helping people in organizations tackle real problems.  But writing was and is the main thing I do and want to do.

During the final years of Scaling Up Excellence, when people asked me what was I up to, I often joked that I was trying to type myself out of solitary confinement in my garage (see above picture – that is where I do most of my serious writing and what it looks like now).  But when they said “that must be tough” or “aren’t you lonely,” I said that, when it comes to my work, I am happiest when I am by myself writing.   This sentiment often surprises people, as I seem like such an extrovert.  And I do like being around other people – just not too much! 

Another sign that my identity is as a writer is evident in what I read for fun.  Huggy, who is one of the leading quantitative organizational researchers on the planet, reads statistic books for pleasure.  In contrast, I have always read books about the craft of writing for pleasure (and inspiration).  My belief that academics would be better writers if they read such books has got me in trouble:  When I was an editor at an academic journal called the Administrative Science Quarterly, I sent a copy of Strunk & White’s classic Elements of Style to a renowned scholar (she wrote terrible sentences).  She never spoke to me again (but I did detect some improvement in her writing). I especially love some of the old “Writers at Work” interviews published in the Paris Review – especially this set edited by George Plimpton.  It has interviews with famous writers including T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller, and a rather grumpy Ernest Hemingway who didn’t really want to talk about his process.  But Hemingway did say that every writer needs a “a built-in shock-proof shit de­tector.” I love that. (Update: The complete set of the Paris Review interviews are online, spanning from the 1950's to the 2010's. I have been reading through them this morning.  I especially like Truman Capote from 1957 and William Gibson from 2011, but I have a couple hundred left to read)

I am also fond of Stephen King’s amazing if disjointed On Writing, I resonated with his motivation for writing this book about how he practices his craft – that he wanted people to understand that his day job was “about the language.”  Along these lines,I don’t think that Huggy was quite prepared for the perhaps 1000 conversations that I initiated about the words we used and how our sentences sounded during our seven year scaling project.  I was also astounded to learn that, for big hunk of Stephen King’s career, he consumed huge amounts of beer and (later) cocaine as he wrote (he was drinking a case – 24 cans – of 16oz tallboys a day before he went on the wagon in the late 1980s).  He wrote The Shining and Misery when he was totally wasted (not just drunk – some days he had cotton swabs jammed in his nose to stop the bleeding from all the cocaine abuse – but he kept typing).  

The business book world is a bit weird because, well, lots of people produce best sellers who don’t spend their days writing.  There are a lot of ghost writers out there – much of what you read under the bylines of CEOs, consultants, and management gurus are written by others. Sometimes the writers are listed as authors and other times they are not.  The first time I did an HBR article, back in about 1998, our editor Suzy Wetlaufer (now Welch, she married Jack) asked me “are you the author, the writer, or both?” I was dumbfounded by the question, but I have since learned that “writers” play an important and usually honorable role in spreading ideas about leadership, innovation, and so on.  I have also learned that some great books are produced when a person with great ideas has a mind meld with a great professional writer (as happened with Creativity Inc.)

 But this post is about and for people like me who are writers, or aspire to be, by Steve Barley’s definition.  Writing is such a quirky and individualistic process that what works for me probably won’t work for you, but here are some of the lessons that the process of getting the scaling book done reinforced for me:

1. I go through periods where I fret and suffer over what I am going to write – I can’t write anything that meets my standards without first going such periods of purgatory.  This fretting time is in addition to the research and reading that I do.  I often can’t tell the difference between when I am procrastinating and when I my brain is working out what to do next – the main indication is, usually quite suddenly, I shift gears from being unable to write to being able to produce sentences and paragraphs.  This process isn’t necessary for everyone.  My co-author Jeff Pfeffer’s ability to just blast things out amazes me, for example.   For me, as I get closer to being able to write something, I start seeing the flow in my mind’s eye and start hearing the words I am going to write in my head.   For a short piece, such as this blog post, the fretting might go on for an hour or less, for the book, I spent months (and many long bike rides) trying to think of the structure, and especially the language for the book proposal – which was quite detailed (22,000 words) and then I went through another few months of such fretting before I could really start writing the book.   And before I started work on each chapter, I usually had to go through about a week of this discomfort. Yes, I would talk to Huggy pretty much every day, we would meet and brainstorm, we would do interviews, talk to colleagues, and read research – but the fretting was somehow different.

2.  Once I am able to produce text, my productivity is a direct function of how much time I spend at the keyboard MINUS the amount of time I spend poking around the web – emails, shopping, social media, reading news stories and weird articles,  and all that other necessary stuff and addictive nonsense.  Most of my lessons are pretty idiosyncratic, but my experience with doctoral students, faculty, and now people who aspire to write more for more applied audiences suggests that this lesson is universal. Talking about writing isn’t writing. Sitting in front of the screen and intending to write, but doing 10 hours of emails instead (I have had plenty of days like that), or shopping for a new dress or a new car don’t count. Nor does Facebook or Twitter.

3. One of my favorite lines in the Paris Review from comes from Aldous Huxley: "All my thoughts are second thoughts."  As I’ve confessed on this blog before, all my thoughts are third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. I spend at least 50% of my productive time reading and editing drafts I already have.  When I am working a chapter, I start at the beginning and read and edit almost every day before getting to the new text (even though that is usually what I have been fretting over).  When a chapter is done, I put it aside for a couple days, and then go back and edit it again before showing it to anyone. 

4. I edit by ear, as I have heard it called. I know that many writers have better writing styles. But I am not happy – and I feel fake – when something I write sounds like someone else.  Especially in my books, there is a tone, a voice, I try to maintain throughout that sounds like — I hope – how I talk, but is smarter and more organized. Bascially, for me, listening to the voice I hear in my head and trying to get it to sound just right to my ear is the backbone of my writing process.  (Also, each of my books has a somewhat different voice – Scaling Up Excellence is less edgy than The No Asshole Rule).

I am VERY protective of my writing voice.  I reject many many changes from editors and copyeditors that undermine it (in my biased opinion).  And while most of what I write is grammatically correct, I will break rules when necessary. I have had some mighty good editors over the years – Julia Kirby at HBR is probably the best (she has never done a book of mine, only articles), and Rick Wolff who did The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, as well as Roger Scholl who did Scaling Up Excellence, are both skilled editors and get my voice obsession.

As an author, you’ve got to be careful because, at every stage, there are editors and others who mean well, but stamp out your spirit and make your words sound dull (For one of my books, I had an awful copyeditor who would have ruined the book – I rejected over 90% of her changes).  Here, I have a suggestion for authors that most publishers won’t like, but if they were smart, they would do it routinely.  Right before your book goes to the copyediting stage, insist on having a conversation with your copyeditor and explain what you are trying to accomplish, and listen to his or perspective too.  And insist on seeing the editing in the first chapter after it is done. That way, you and the copyeditor won’t waste a lot of work.  (Note I feel so strongly about this that I am going to start putting it in as a requirement in book contracts – copyeditors are crucial to the quality of a book, but they also are strong willed people who can kill your voice).

In general, my experience is that about 50% of the editing (of any kind) I have had makes things better and 50% makes things worse. So my attitude is that, at every stage, you need to be vigilant about people who will screw up your work, as the risk always lurks.  (Warning: titles are often the worst.  I can’t tell you how many articles and blog posts I have had re-titled by people who clearly didn’t read them or twisted the meaning massively.  Ask for approval of any title of anything you write.  A lot of publications won’t like that either – but it has your name on it).

5.  As suggested above, I am obsessed with words. I am always looking for interesting words and phrases, and always trying to eliminate language that strike me as hollow or mind-numbing. Consider “adding value” and “capabilities.”  I don’t know why, but as soon as I hear someone say those words or I read them, I glaze over. I never use them.  I was soured on “adding value” at the World Economic Forum at Davos a few years back. I noticed that CEOs used it to avoid specifics or human emotions, and sometimes, as code for “as long as we make a lot of money, it does not matter how many evil things we do."  And I don’t like the word “capabilities” because it often seems to be used by executives and experts who are talking about the skills, motivations, and experience held by the people in an organization – while, at the same time, as way to avoid digging into the nuances and messiness of how those people actually propel the organization forward. 

I have kept a running list of words and phrases called “Words I Like” since about 2000. I add something about once a week. It has 795 words right now (fewer entries, as many are phrases), which range from “mangle,” to “trapped in a perpetual present tense,” to “pizzaz,” to “poisonous protection,” to “ruckus,” to “satisfying triple whammy.”  The challenge – and what I strive for as I edit by ear – is to use interesting words that sound like me, but do not to distract or confuse the reader.  (I dislike how publications like the New Yorker sometimes seem to use words, phrases, and obscure references that seem designed to make their readers feel dumb.)  I also admit that I love and use some words too much, such as “propel,” “incite,” and “infect.”   I usually have to go back through and cross out about 50% of these and other darlings because they get repetitive (a skilled editor like Roger Scholl notices and saves me from myself). 

6.  Finally, and somewhat paradoxically, the longer that Huggy and I worked on Scaling Up Excellence, the more of a social process the writing became.  Not just between the two of us. But especially between us and the long and diverse list of people we worked with who were knee-deep in scaling challenges.  That is why the Appendix is called “The Seven Year Conversation.”  Getting the flow, language, and logic right required the above writing process.  But we wove in additional steps to get the stories right — to help assure both the facts, advice, and emotional tone rang true to people who are knee-deep in scaling challenges. 

We constantly sent short snippets and long sections that we wrote to the stars of the book for their review and comments.  We are  grateful for how patient (and smart) these scaling veterans were — including Claudia Kotchka (who led the spread of innovation practices and roles at Procter & Gamble), Bonny Simi (JetBlue), John Lilly (now a venture capitalist at Greylock), Perry Klehbahn (head of executive ed at the Stanford d. School), Dr. Louise Liang (who led an amazing scaling effort at Kaiser Permanente as they rolled out their computerized patient record system), Michael Dearing (a venture capitalist and d.school teacher), Chris Fry and Steve Green (who did impressive scaling at Salesforce.com and now are senior execs at Twitter), and many many others.  We also presented our emerging ideas and key stories to at least 100 diverse audiences — and refined the content and emphasis of the book based on what seemed interesting (and dull) to them.  We did use other sources – academic research, press reports, and our own observations and experiences – that did not require such interactions.  But Scaling Up Excellence is the product of a decidedly “social” approach — even though it required thousands of hours of solo work.

Again, I am not sure that the above six ideas reflect how other writers work or will help others with their writing. Although I am pretty confident that my second point is universal, that writing productivity is a direct function of the amount of time that you actually spend writing (Stephen King might have been drunk and stoned when he was writing Misery, but he kept on working away at the manuscript).

I would be curious to hear about your writing process from those readers who practice this or a related craft.  More broadly, I am curious to hear about the kinds of workplace and business writing that appeals to you (and the kinds that you can’t stand).

Finally, to return to Steve Barley’s “you are what you do,” I was simply unable to write anything but emails for about six weeks after our book was done and copyedited in early fall.  But now – today is a good example– I seem to be back to myself and am spending a lot of time writing.  So look for more blog posts here, at LinkedIIn, HBR, and elsewhere.  We are also working on articles for various outlets — I just did one for Wired UK that was fun, and we have multiple ideas for tying the ideas in Scaling Up Excellence to current news stories. 

If you have suggestions about scaling stories we should know about or scaling themes we should write about, please let us know your thoughts. 

I was tried
to get this out over Twitter, but breaking it into pieces ruins it.  If
you want to read one of the most spot on, timeless, and funny books about organizational
politics, check out the F.M. Cornford's 1908 classic MICROCOSMOGRAPHIA
ACADEMICA: BEING A GUIDE FOR THE YOUNG ACADEMIC POLITICIAN. 
You can get this short gem here for free.

And here is
my favorite bit:

“The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly
right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have
the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the
present one. Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or,
if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever
be done for the first time.”

It is amazing how over 100 years later, the same principle
is still applied far too often.  See Daniel Kahneman’s book
if you want to see some of the main reasons why – thinking is hard work!

P.S.  Cornford was a famous classicist at
Cambridge around the turn of the 20^th century.

A compelling and instructive story on Sears Holdings appeared in BusinessWeek last month — they own Sears stores, Kmart, Land's End and a host of other brands such as Craftsman tools, Kenmore appliances, and DieHard batteries.  It is written by Mina Kimes and provides a textbook example of how, when people in a company are pitted against each other — rather than pressed and paid to support the greater good — that cooperation evaporates. People treat insiders (rather than outsiders) as enemies.  And even when they know what needs to be done for the effectiveness of the organization as a whole, they often don't do it — because helping others (or contributing to the greater good) undermines their income, stature, and job security.

Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote about this disease in some detail in The Knowing Doing Gap in 2000 and in related articles and posts based on the book, for example, here, here, and here. It has been over a decade since we focused on this problem, but if anything, it has become worse in many companies — as the Sears story shows.  Kimes' detailed article provides many examples of the problems caused by the Sears structure and incentives, where CEO Eddie Lampert has split the company into some 30 warring units, each with "its own president, chief marketing officer, board
of directors, and, most important, its own profit-and-loss statement."

Lampert defends this structure as "decentralized," but that confuses a structure where individual units have autonomy to act largely as the please with one where there is no incentive (or worse, a disincentive) to support the company's overall performance.  Google, for example, is quite decentralized, but there have always been both cultural and financial pressures to do what is best for the company as a whole.  Even within the famously competitive and decentralized General Electric, there have been incentives for cooperation for decades and selfish "cowboys" who don't support colleagues and the culture have been banished from the company.

In contrast, let's take a rather astounding example from the Sears story:

"At the beginning of 2010, Lampert hired 20-year Wal-Mart Stores veteran Jim Haworth to run Sears and Kmart stores as president of
retail services. Haworth, an affable, mustachioed Midwesterner, saw
immediately that Kmart’s food and drugs were more expensive than those
at Walmart and Target.
So he met with a few top executives, including Chief Financial Officer
Mike Collins and operations chief Scott Freidheim, to look into
discounting goods such as milk and soda.

That summer the group
asked the company’s internal research team to study the idea, according
to eight former executives. The researchers came back with a proposal:
Cut prices at several dozen Kmarts across the country, bringing the cost
of items to within 5 percent of Walmart’s. The business unit presidents
agreed. But when Haworth’s group tried to get them to cough up
$2 million to fund the project, no one was willing to sacrifice business
operating profits to increase traffic."

The reason, according to the story, that no President was willing to cough up any funds was that cutting into their businesses operating profit would, in turn, reduce their bonuses.  The parent company refused to fund the effort as well and the key executives involved in pressing for the proposal are no longer with Sears. In short, it is a nearly perfect example of how — even though everyone knows the right thing to do for the collective good — no one does it because they live in zero-sum, I win and you lose, world. As the article shows, this mindset can create some mighty ugly scenes:

"The bloodiest battles took place in the marketing meetings, where
different units sent their CMOs to fight for space in the weekly
circular. These sessions would often degenerate into screaming matches.
Marketing chiefs would argue to the point of exhaustion. The result,
former executives say, was a “Frankenstein” circular with incoherent
product combinations (think screwdrivers being advertised next to
lingerie)."

This me me me mindset might work in situations where there is no need for collaboration, information sharing, or even pooled resources.    But it doesn't work when people and units depend on each other to succeed. 

I also want to emphasize — despite some suggestion from Lampert and others that cooperation is a form of evil socialism — that many companies have cultures and incentives that generate both competition and collaboration simultaneously (to name five widely varied organizations, McKinsey, IDEO, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and the Men's Wearhouse all accomplish this one way or another). The trick is that star employees are defined (and trained, groomed, rewarded, and led) as those who do high quality individual work (or, for more senior people, lead top performing teams or businesses) AND who help colleagues (on their team, on different teams, and in different businesses) succeeded as well.  If you don't do both consistently, you aren't a star. In such places, the competitive pressures to HELP others and the
ORGANIZATION are palpable: People compete against each other by trying
to be MORE collaborative than their colleagues.  Its like a weird Jedi mind trick, but it works beautifully when done well.

While I am no fan of forced rankings (I don't believe that every organization must be doomed to have 10%  to 20% defective employees, for example), when people are evaluated, or even ranked, on this dual standard, organizations perform far better than when have you a situation such as at Sears where "As the business unit leaders pursued individual profits, rivalries
broke out. Former executives say they began to bring laptops with screen
protectors to meetings so their colleagues couldn’t see what they were
doing." 

In short, when I want to know if an organization rewards or punishes cooperation, the diagnostic question I ask is "Who are the superstars around here? Are they the selfish people who stomp on others on the way to the top? Or are they the people who do great work AND who use what they know to lend a helping hand to others?"

P.S. The recent structural changes at Microsoft — long infamous for its nasty internal competition — provide an interesting counterpoint. They are not only becoming more centralized and streamlined ala Apple, as The New York Times reports "The goal is to get thousands of employees to collaborate more closely,
to avoid some duplication and, as a result, to build their products to
work more harmoniously together." Microsoft has a long history and ingrained habits to overcome, but this strikes me as a step in the right direction.

Please forgive my months of silence.  I appreciate all the folks who have asked if I am OK (I am fine!) and who have urged me to start blogging again.  You will start hearing more here about what I've been doing the last six months.  The short story is that Huggy Rao and I have been working like crazy on Scaling Up Excellence, our book that will be published in early 2014. We just have a few finishing touches after putting seven years or so into this project. Then I will start talking about it — this book has been quite an adventure and we are already talking to a lot of different groups about the main ideas.

Meanwhile, I was moved to do a post because, as we have written the book, one of the themes that has moved center stage, and I've blogged about before, is accountability: How it is a hallmark of organizations that spread and sustain excellence (and its absence of a hallmark of bad ones).  This problem was especially evident in United Airlines' poor treatment of my friend's young daughter last summer.  As counterpoint, a friend sent me this note of apology he got from Delta. Note I have removed his name and account number.  Obviously, airlines can't control things like the weather and other systemic delays — but when leaders step-up and do this kind of thing, it creates a lot of goodwill — and is evidence that they are taking responsibility and trying to fix things. 

Those of who teach and study learning, innovation, design thinking, and creativity are constantly talking about how important it is accept and learn from failure.  Diego has written great stuff on this, arguing that "failure sucks but instructs" and when I give speeches, I often half-joke that, if you want to skip reading most of my books, perhaps the best compact summary are my various snippets and blog posts on failure, and perhaps the best diagnostic question for determining if an organization learns well, a boss creates a climate of fear or not, is innovative, turns knowledge into action, and on and on, is "What happens when people make a mistake? " Do they balmestorm and stigmatize?  Forgive and forget? Or do they forgive and remember (see this post at HBR), so they can learn, help others learn, be held accountable and — if people keep making the same mistake — be reformed, transferred, or perhaps fired.

I just read the best piece on this perspective in a long time, a piece that the amazing Larry Prusak (who I would rather hear give a speech than any other management thinker, he can be magical) wrote for ASK Magazine called "What's Right About Being Wrong." Follow the link to read it all.  Here are some quotes from this little gem that especially struck me:

It starts:

A number of years ago I was asked by some clients to come up with a rapid-fire indicator to determine whether a specific organization was really a "learning organization." Now, I have always believed that all organizations learn things in some ways, even if what they learn does not correspond well to reality or provide them with any useful new knowledge. After thinking about the request for a bit, though, I decided the best indicator would be to ask employees, "Can you make a mistake around here?"

Sounds familiar? Listen to the names he names in the next paragraph:

Why? Well, if you pay a substantial price for being wrong, you are rarely going to risk doing anything new and different because novel ideas and practices have a good chance of failing, at least at first. So you will stick with the tried and true, avoid mistakes, and learn very little. I think this condition is still endemic in most organizations, whatever they say about learning and encouraging innovative thinking. It is one of the strongest constraints I know of to innovation, as well as to learning anything at all from inevitable mistakes—one of the most powerful teachers there is. Some recent political memoirs by Tony Blair and George Bush also inadvertently communicate this same message by denying that any of their decisions were mistaken. If you think you have never made a mistake, there is no need to bother learning anything new.

The above paragraph really made me think.  Indeed, just last night, I was having a drink with on my colleagues, and we were talking about the hallmarks of the good versus bad bosses we have had during our academic careers, and we realized that the good ones admit mistakes, tell everyone what they've learned, and push themselves and others forward in a new direction. The worst never admit they've made a mistake — so they are seen as arrogant, unable to learn, and unable to teach and lead effectively.  (See this related post on medical mistakes).

To continue, then Larry started talking about Alan Greenspan as the rare example of someone who admitted a mistake:

I can easily summon up the grave image of Alan Greenspan testifying before Congress last year on the causes of the financial crisis. What was so very startling was seeing him admit that he was wrong! It was such an unusual event that it made headlines around the world. But why should it be so rare and so startling? Greenspan had a hugely complex job, one where many critical variables are either poorly understood or not known at all. Nevertheless, neither he, nor any other federal director I have heard about, has ever said anything vaguely like what he did that day before our elected officials and the public.

It is quite an essay, and as always, Larry brings a new spin.  I have not exactly had warm feelings toward Greenspan since the meltdown, but Larry does a nice job of showing us how rare his confession is among powerful people. 

Finally, note that I am not arguing that people should go around apologizing constantly for every little thing, as I show in Good Boss, Bad Boss, there is a kind or recipe her for apologizing in ways the build rather than undermine the confidence people have in your abilities — which includes, perhaps most crucially, demonstrating what you've learned and are doing differently as a result.