Category: General

James Dyson is the inventor of the successful and now common Dual Cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner.  I did a session yesterday on design thinking with a group of executive MBA's yesterday. One who had consulted to the company pointed out that Dyson — supported by his wife's job as an art teacher — took five years and 5127 failed prototype to develop on that worked.  If failure sucks but instructs, that is a lot of learning.  It also is an interesting case because it shows how difficult it is to make rational decisions in the innovation process.  Certainly, say 4000 prototypes and 4 years into the adventrue, any reasonable person would have assumed that this was a failure, an extreme case of escalating commitment to a failed course of action.  As I have written here before, James March described this aspect of creativity elegantly:

If you want to learn more about Dyson's quest, I suggest his autobiography, Against the Odds.

Getting Even: The Truth About Workplace Revenge — and How to Stop It was just published.  I read it several months ago when the authors Thomas Tripp and Bob Bies asked me to write a blurb.  I found it to be extremely well-crafted and very useful — it has the best blend of evidence, good writing, and useful ideas of any book I've ever read on workplace revenge.  The explanations and advice about how to overcome vicious circles, Hatfield and McCoy stuff, are especially strong. 

I've written quite a bit about rude, arrogant, and insensitive doctors.  Dr. Gooser stars in in The No Asshole Rule (note the artist's rendition above, which Value Rich magazine provided to go along with the text on page on page 21) and my post on Dr. Gooser about digs into evidence showing that bullying is especially prevalent in medicine.  On the brighter side of things, new guidelines by the Joint Commission (which regulates U.S. hospitals) mean that those hospitals that let bullies run rampant risk losing accreditation.  Also, one of the most heartening notes I ever got from a doctor was about how — after suffering so much abuse from attending physicians during their medical training — he and his fellow residents vowed to treat residents and nurses with respect when they rose to more powerful positions.   A vow,  he reported, that all had kept (see this post). I've also written about the impressive efforts that some hospitals and doctors are beginning to take to reduce medical errors, especially in neonatal intensive care units.

As such, I was intrigued to see a story in the science section of today's New York Times that discussed how nasty and arrogant doctors not only drive nurses out of the profession, they also can create a climate that causes more medical errors.  Here is one example from the story:

In one instance witnessed by Dr. Angood of the Joint Commission, a
nurse called a surgeon to come and verify his next surgical patient and
to mark the spot where the operation would be done. The harried surgeon
yelled at the nurse to get the patient ready herself. When he showed up
late to the operating room, he did not realize the surgery site was
mismarked and operated on the wrong part.

“The surgeon then
berated the entire team for their error and continued to denigrate them
to others, when the error was the surgeon’s because he failed to
cooperate in the process,” Dr. Angood said.

A hostile environment
erodes cooperation and a sense of commitment to high-quality care, Dr.
Angood said, and that increases the risk of medical errors.

Check out the rest of the article here  plus the accompanying piece on "The Six Habits of Highly Respectful Physicians." 

I have been keeping track of the problem of nastiness in hospitals — especially by doctors — for a few years and I have been disturbed by how more and more evidence keeps coming out about the damage done by such widespread nastiness. But I am heartened by the serious steps that are apparently being taken to tackle the problem — including by the Joint Commission.

Here is a little philosophy I like from Karl Popper.  It is a little like saying "failure sucks but instructs," but far more elegant:

“Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we can correct them”

P.S. The source is: Popper, K. R. 1992. In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years.
London: Routledge.

I just put-up this post over at BusinessWeek based on an inspired email I got from an oppressed employee who uses “asshole boxing” and a variety of other clever tactics to blunt the damage he suffers from an asshole boss.  They used the picture above to lead into the post.

Check out Diego's post, he has a great "infectious action" analysis. Just about a million people around the world have already pledged to help set the record for most downloads — ranging from about 150,000 in the U.S. to 32 in Guiena. Join the movement and get the best browser around. I am not just saying this because I like people at Mozilla and their mission (which I do), less biased critics such as Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal are saying the same thing.

Our d.school students in Creating Infectious Engagement are going full blast.  Their final assignment is due Thursday and they are presenting results to executives from Microsoft, Google, and a host of other folks associated with the class and Climate Savers Computing.   I've already blogged about lovethe1yourewith and shutdownandprotect. But the other groups are working just as hard. I just got an email from Jason, who along with Tristha, Doug, and Amal, have developed this really cool thing called "Turn Off Tool for Tots," which is a big button you can download from their site so your kids can have an easy and visible way to turn-off their computers. The button is pictured above; go here to get it and read more. I love Jason's remark about how they are in full creating infectious action mode: "We're targeting parents with young
children, and are in full go mode! Talk about AdWords and blogs and message
boards and the works…" These students are jamming and I am most impressed.

The No Asshole Rule continues to provoke stories and reactions, many from the people who read this blog and
write to me, and although things are less crazy than a few months ago,
also continues to provoke media attention. This is a round-up of some interesting things that happened
over the past few weeks, plus I am giving a couple local talks in the area that
are open to the public this week.

Porcupines with hearts of gold. I received several detailed emails from
people who told me stories about bosses they had who, on first impression,
seemed like assholes, but after you got past their gruff exterior, they were
actually great people. I think that such stories are important to hear and
think about, and I am working on a post dedicated to people who, on first contact,
seem nasty, but are actually great people. I’ve always talked about how important
it is to be slow to label people as assholes, but am thinking about it more deeply
now. I mentioned this at a talk recently at a software firm, and the audience
just cracked-up when one engineer said something like “We say that people like
this have a bad user interface, but a good operating system.” If you have ideas and/or stories about this  perspective, please write!

Subtle assholes.  I received an especially thoughtful email from a
woman who started by saying “Thank you for your
book. I found that it reads almost like the Zen of Working with an asshole by
basing responses and framing situation as the kindest and happiest among us do.”
But she went on to make a great point about something that the book should have
developed more.

 One comment, however. I felt that this book was almost too
heavily waited to the very flaming asshole and not nearly enough on the more
subtle arse.  …..I would encourage you to
write about the methods and the effects of the more subtle arse; the alter-ego
to the flaming asshole – who can have just as profound an effect on people but
is much less obvious to weed out. I related well to the feeling of uselessness,
helplessness and lack of confidence that the more flaming assholes inspired in
the stories in your book. But I did not relate to the bosses’ characters that
made them feel that way. I think the subtler jerks are just as bad, but much,
much harder to recognize.

I
agree completely, and although I touch on jerks who treat others as invisible
and so on in The No Asshole Rule, I agree that I need to focus more on the moves made by
subtle assholes. Indeed, these more
subtle assholes actually can often get away with doing more damage than their
more “over the top” and less politically skilled counterparts.

Nasty to her nannies. A huge number of people in the United States –
and everywhere else in the world – work taking care of other people’s children,
and plenty of these bosses are assholes.  Susan Tabas Tepper, a Phildelphia
area millionaire, is apparently a repeat
offender. The Main Line Times reports

The latest incident of alleged abuse occurred at about 10:40
p.m. on May 20.
Tepper, who had been drinking earlier that night at dinner, became angry when
Urszula Kordzior, a native of Poland
who was employed by Tepper as a nanny, wanted to leave the residence that
night, according to the criminal complaint.

Tepper allegedly blocked the doorway when Kordzior attempted to
exit the home and leave in a vehicle that Tepper provided as part of the
employment agreement, the complaint said. Demanding that Kordzior turn over the
keys to the vehicle, Tepper followed the nanny outside, the complaint said. Continuing
to yell at Kordzior, Tepper scratched the left side of Kordzior’s face and lip
with her hand and then shoved her to the ground, according to the complaint.

Kordzior’s nine-year-old daughter attempted to intervene,
telling Tepper not to hurt her mother, the complaint said. Tepper, using an
epithet directed at the girl, then shoved the girl, the complaint said.

The Flying ARSE takes off. I finally launched The Flying ARSE, a 24 item self-test that
you can take to see if you are driving other airline passengers, or perhaps to take
with others in mind.  I thank Diego
and Pam
Slim for their posts, and several blog readers for making some suggestions about
improving the test. I will get some information from Electric Pulse about how many
people are taking the test and the range of scores. Meanwhile, the original ARSE is
approaching 90,000 completions.

Recent press coverage. I spent an hour on Joy Cardin’s show last Thursday on
Wisconsin Public Radio and had some most interesting callers. I was personally
most troubled by the faculty member from a university who complained that one
of his colleagues as constantly driving young faculty out of his academic
department, but that because this senior faculty member brought in a lot of
research money, everyone in the administration and his colleagues were afraid
to confront him about his behavior.  Alas, academia can be as bad as the private
sector. You can listen to the program
here. I also had several other articles on the book appear including one in
CIO Insight
and another on TheStreet.com.
I found this article
by David Simanoff in the Tampa Tribune to be especially thoughtful.

The Huffington Post business section is live. As I wrote about a couple
weeks ago, The Huffington Post, one of the highest rated “gang blogs” on the
web is just starting a business
section. It went this weekend and
has some interesting posts. I especially
like the one by Giles Slade called Hold
the iPhone. I will also post there occasionally, and I just sent them a couple posts that introduce Huffington
readers to The No Asshole Rule.

Two talks and
book signings on May 30^th.   I am doing two talks and book signings in a
four hour period on Wednesday, May 30^th in the Stanford area. Both are
open to the public. The first will be an interview by Stanford student Mike Rothenberg
in the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar
Series on the Stanford Campus.  It
will be held from 4:30 to 5:30 in the Skilling Auditorium and be followed by a
book signing. This is a Stanford class,
but it is open to the public, and Skilling holds a lot of people.  Also, the talk will be available as podcast at the above URL within 24 hours (usually sooner than that). Next, I run over to Books INC in Mountain View to
talk about The No Asshole Rule and sign some books there too. That event starts at 7:30 and the bookstore in is at 301 Castro Street.

Parting shot: Bringing the book to work
can be risky! I
got this email awhile back, but never printed it: Mr.
Sutton- Maybe you have received similar emails, but I was just called by my
boss and told not to bring The No Asshole Rule book back to work.  I left
the book on my desk at work and read it during breaks, and I didn’t care if
people saw the title or not, I actually talked about it to some
coworkers.  Anyway, I thought you might be interested in how your book has
been banned in my office. 

Jeff
Pfeffer and I published The Knowing-Doing
Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action about 7 years ago. It is a book about why smart companies and
people sometimes don’t do things that they know they should, and how to
overcome impediments to organizational action including using smart talk as a
substitute for organizational action, precedent, fear, flawed metrics and
incentives, and dysfunctional competition. We’ve both been heartened by people
who have contacted us over the years to tell us how they have used the ideas to
spur action.  After all, as we say in the
book, just reading and talking about getting things done isn’t enough, you
actually have to do it.

As
such, I was delighted do get an e-mail from Richard Hollingum, who runs a
company called The Department of Doing
based in Devonport, New Zealand. Richard
wrote me,“I set up the Department of Doing 6 years ago
and we work with some amazing clients all over the world, and preach the power
of doing. As they say "Doing requires Doing Something". Your book
fits so much with what we stand for. I spent too many years sitting on
committees, board meetings where decisions were made, consensus was agreed and
still nothing happened. So out of sheer frustration I set up DOD.It is the best
thing ever did. So liberating, so much fun and makes the hard work all the more
rewarding.”

This
is music to my ears and I am looking forward to learning more about his company
when he visits California in March for the TED Conference. Check out the attached “The Directives of
Doing” that Richard sent me, a code of conduct for people in his company.
Wonderful stuff, like, Never say “That’s not my job.” The
business world is full of organizers, planners, facilitators, and managers.  It doesn’t need any more. At The Department of
Doing, we only want doers. We are about making stuff, and making stuff happen.
We are about taking client’s problems and making them go away. That’s or job.”

P.S.
I also loved Richard’s reply when I wrote him back that I would be delighted to
meet with him: “You’re on!!! Consider it Done. Let’s
talk real soon. Take care. Gotta dash, real busy doing. He sounds like quite
character!

Download dod_leaflet_stamp_directives.pdf

Behavioral
scientists do many studies, including controlled experiments, which entail
massive advanced planning. But some of the most interesting studies happen when
something strange or unplanned happens, and the researcher capitalizes on serendipity.
Consider a little study done in the late 1970’s by industrial psychologist
Frank J. Smith, who had collected employee attitude data from about 3000
employees at Sears’ headquarters in Chicago. Smith found that employee attitudes towards
their jobs and their supervisors weren’t especially useful predictors of which
employees were absent from work UNTIL the day a crippling snowstorm hit. Employees had a good excuse to stay home, so
they had considerable discretion over whether to make the tough trip in or not. That day, employees who were more satisfied
with their supervision and other parts of their jobs were far more likely to
make the trip in than those who were dissatisfied.  In
particular, whether or not they were satisfied with their supervision was among
the strongest predictors of attendance. Since then, other researchers have
shown that when people feel mistreated and dissatisfied with their jobs, they
are unwilling to expend “discretionary effort.”  It makes sense to me. When I am stuck working
for, or with, assholes, I don’t go out of my way to help. But when I admire my bosses
and peers, I’ll go to extreme lengths to help –- and it is clear that most
people feel and act the same way.

PS:
I couldn’t find a soft copy. You can’t get one online at Stanford. If you want to track down the article, the complete citation is Smith,
Frank J (1977) “Work attitudes as
predictors of attendance on a
specific day.” Journal of Applied
Psychology, 62:16-19.