Category: General

I’ve been having a
lot of trouble with Amazon lately. They had the wrong description up for both
Hard Facts and The No Asshole Rule, and both my publishers –- Harvard Business
School Press and Warner — have found that getting these things repaired can
take weeks with Amazon. It was taking
forever for Amazon to put up the correct description of The No Asshole Rule. So
I finally got fed-up and wrote a note of complaint directly to jeff@amazon.com, which is allegedly the
CEO’s email.  I got what seemed like a
personal response in a few minutes: “I couldn’t agree with you more. The goal
is to treat authors and publishers like customers. Something we’ve clearly
failed at in this case. Let me poke into this one, and thanks for taking the
time and making the effort to complain.” Whether it was really Jeff Bezos, or just
a stand in, I was impressed with both the speed and the tone. Now let’s see how long it takes them to fix
it!

Diego Rodriguez and
I are giving a keynote talk at 8AM PST on July 26^th at the Alwayson conference
at Stanford . We will talk about the Creating
Infectious Action class that we taught in the new Stanford d.school.Diego and I,
and others at the d.school, are on a quest to infuse design thinking in what
people think and do at Stanford. We will also talk about how try to produce
people who can “do” creative collaboration –-people  who can work in teams that do creative work,
not just become solo stars who rise to the top of their classes in business, engineering,
psychology, or whatever.

Please come by and say hi to us if are there, and if you can’t
make it, you can watch it live on video. We then lead a panel of CEO’s involved
in spreading infectious action, including the amazing Mitchell Baker from Mozilla.org.

Jeff Pfeffer,
my dear friend and co-author, and I always have a lot of fun – and always learn
a lot – by arguing about ideas and pressing them as far as we can take them.
Our motto is “the more we fight, the better we write.”

Jeff and I have wrestling a
bit over “the virtues of assholes.”  Jeff is always worth listening to,
but it is especially true in this case because he is the world’s leading
researcher on power and politics in organizations. Pfeffer is also the author
of the most frequently used MBA text book in class on power and politics,
called Managing
with Power. He is also a Business 2.0 columnist,
and if you check out his columns, you will see that he is really smart and
loves slaughtering sacred cows with superior logic and evidence!  (I
disagree agree with him at times, but even when I think he is wrong, he always
makes me think hard about things).

Here is what Jeff has to say
about the virtues of assholes:

‘On reflection,
and reflecting on the enormous amount of mail I got on my Business 2.0 column “The Courage to Rise Above”, there is an
interesting "issue" which also comes up in my power class. Many
people somehow seem to assume that what is good for the organization or collectivity
is what is good for the person and vice versa. Therefore, to take the
present case in point, if someone behaves like a jerk and is demeaning and
nasty to others, this creates a climate of fear and distrust, causes turnover,
inhibits cooperation, and has a number of deleterious effects on the
organization (or group). There is little doubt about that.

However, whether
or not such behavior can be effective in advancing the individual’s private,
individual, and possibly selfish interests is an entirely different
matter. Many of the people we study in Paths to Power were jerks, or
worse, including Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, etc. But they were
quite successful using virtually any measure of career success, in part because
so many people are conflict averse, that they often get their way as others
back down. Which is not to say that I don’t completely agree with your values,
your trade-offs, and your instincts on this issue. It is just that it is
not clear that Leo Durocher was wrong (he is misquoted as saying "nice
guys finish last." Apparently the real quote was that nice guys
finish seventh).’

Jeff is making a subtle and
essential distinction. I agree with him, but would add that if organizations
began calculating the TCA (Total Costs of Assholes), the amount of money and
time wasted on these people, the great people they drive out organizations, and
a host of other costs can be shocking expensive. The
No Asshole Rule presents
information from a firm about the costs that they calculated for a star salesperson who was also a
flaming asshole. When they added-up the costs of hiring one new assistants after
another for him, the amount of time the HR managers and executives spent
fielding complaints from him and trying to cool-out his numerous victims, the
cost of his anger management classes, and a host of other expenses, they
realized that his antics were costing the firm over $150,000 a year.

Unfortunately, there are
some organizations where such creeps are tolerated, even glorified, where they
are rewarded for using their demeaning ways to push others aside to get and
keep their job as top dog. And there are industries – fashion and film – where
the pro-asshole rather than the no-asshole rule seem to be the norm. But here
are many companies where such behavior is simply unacceptable. Examples include
P&G, The Men’s Wearhouse, and Southwest Airlines. Civilized companies like
these show that it is possible to treat people well and still make money. And,
for my tastes, life is too short to be surrounded by assholes, regardless of
their other virtues.

I was interviewed today by Ron Reagan today on 710 KIRO radio
in Seattle,Washington about The No Asshole Rule, or as the called it on
the air, “The No A-hole Rule.” Yes, that Ron Reagan, President Ronald Reagan’s
son. He now works as a talk show host. He was quite charming and a good interviewer.
He also made an excellent point about how he dealt with abusive bosses, which
he had a lot of experience with when he was in ballet. Ron emphasized that the attitude
he conveyed was “You can criticize my work, and I’ll try to
improve, but attacking me is unacceptable or I will leave.” Not bad.

Last week, I asked an experienced salesman which customers are the “assholes”
of his profession.  He had a great
answer: “When I started in the business I am currently in, over 30 years
ago now, a senior sales person heard me call me someone an asshole (I thought I
had only said it to myself just after hanging up on a particularly frustrating
call). He asked me to explain why I used
that term and I did. He then corrected
my usage as in our industry "asshole" had a very specific meaning:  It
should only be used to refer to someone that has negotiated strongly for a particular
line item and then, once it was agreed to, decided that he didn’t want it
anyway.”

I like this little story because, when a customer leaves behind a trail of salespeople who feel spent, de-energized, and
demeaned, he or she qualifies as an asshole in my book. Also note a key nuance: Assholes aren’t always overtly demeaning, some
of the worst of these jerks do their dirty work without uttering an unkind word
and raising their voices – but they leave their victims feeling disrespected, demeaned,
and abused anyway.  Some of the most destructive
assholes entice their victims with smiles, warmth, and compliments, setting the trap before stabbing them in the back.