Category: Reflection

It
wasn’t all "no asshole rule" all the time in 2007. We talked about a lot of other topics related to the workplace,
especially innovation and creativity, the Stanford d.school, evidence-based
management, and what it takes to turn knowledge into action. As I looked back at the year, a dozen
favorite posts and themes came to mind.

1.
Gus
Bitdinger’s Innovation Song. My favorite
book on innovation in big companies is Orbiting the Giant Hairball. We used
it in a class that Michael
Dearing and I taught last winter called “Innovation and Implementation in
Large Organizations.” As a final assignment,  we gave students the crazy assignment of
making a little film that summarized what they learned. Most of the students surprised
us by doing better work that we had hoped. But Gus just knocked us out with this video, called “Back
in Orbit,” which is a remarkably complete and engaging summary of the
book.

2.
Why
Sham Employee Participation Is Worse Than No Participation at All. I devoted a lot of time to writing this post because
too many leaders create processes that require employees to spend hours and
hours of their time making suggestions about how everything from administrative
practices to product design, but they have no intention of ever actually
listening to the employees. After an
analysis of the problem of why so many leaders feel compelled to use such “sham
participation,” I made some potentially obnoxious suggestions to leaders,
followers, and users who are involved in these charades. For example:  “If you, as an administrator, feel compelled
to still have a symbolic process to point to, if you feel compelled to engage
in sham participation anyway, appoint a small committee of employees and select
people who aren’t doing anything especially valuable anyway.  Also, hold
just a few short meetings. That way, the productivity of the organization will
suffer as little as possible.”

 

3.
Failure
Sucks But Instructs. I love this
cartoon, and the message that goes with it.  This is one of the guidelines that Diego and use
to teach design thinking.

 

4. NASCAR
Fun at the Customer-Focused Innovation Program. We had the Andy Papa of Hendrick’s Motor
Sports visit both Stanford twice (Once to executives and once to d.school
students) to teach about how “innovation under constraint” happens at NASCAR,
and both times, he brought by real racing cars to people could have an
authentic pit crew experience (or part of one). It wasn’t just a lot of fun, we
all learned something about how more constraints can sometimes fuel innovation.

 

5. Min Liu’s comments on Why
The d.school Works. After taking a
d.school called Clicks-n-Bricks, where the focus was on fueling sustainability awareness
within Walmart, Min wrote a touching and most insightful post. She was probably too nice. We had some
serious problems getting this project going, but in the end, the students did a
fantastic job (sometimes this happens despite rather than because of the
teaching staff!).  This post also has
links to the presentations that our students gave at Wal-Mart.  As Min wrote:

“Personally, my last quarter at Stanford was the best because I
learned that the process of doing what I love (finally!) is so much better than
living up to some abstract expectation even though it is, by convention, the
best. Sure, the realization was a good part done by myself outside of the
d.school, but it was d.school’s welcoming, innovative, and incubati
ve
environment that helped me realize that the riskier and gutsy-er a path is, the
better.”

6. Why
"It is the Industry Standard" is a Dumb Excuse. I had a bad customer service experience when I
tried to cancel an order for an HP laptop. As I said then, I believe now, I generally have a high opinion of HP
products and service experiences. But I
was quite unhappy when the person I called defended an HP policy (that I thought
was absurd) by saying “it is industry standard.” It seemed to me like saying ‘we are all
idiots,” “we all don’t care about our
customers,” or perhaps (to paraphrase the old saying) “We all think alike, so
none us thinks very much.”  My parents taught me that “but the other kids
do it too” was a completely unacceptable excuse for bad behavior. Too bad that leaders of some of our biggest
companies sometimes forget that lesson.

7.
My CEO: Marina Park’s New Job at The Girl Scouts. On the home front, my wife, Marina Park, spent
most of the year trying to decide what she wanted to next with her life after 8
years of managing partner of a big law firm. She considered jobs as a general
counsel at several public companies, becoming a law firm strategy consultant, and
going back to practice. She realized,
however, that she had enough of the law and law firms and wanted to do
something different, to be part of something that mattered more given her
values. She has been CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts for about two
months now. There is a lot to do, as a
complex five-way merger that created the Northern California Girl Scouts was
made official on October 1. Marina loves
the work and the people she works with.

8. Do
You Need a Penis to Qualify as a B School All Star? I admit that I was flattered to selected by BusinessWeek as one of “10
B-school professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking beyond
the halls of academia.”  I am
not actually a b-school professor, but as I do teach management in a school of
engineering, I guess that is close enough.  I was quite disturbed, however, to see that
there were no women on the list of so-called all stars. From what I could tell,
all us were Caucasian as well. Perhaps it was unwise to complain about BusienssWeek’s kindness to me. Indeed, I got an email suggesting that it was
unwise to “bite the hand that feeds you.” But that parade of 10 all-white men still bothers me, as they are plenty
of women and non-white management professors who are making a big impact.

9.
The Evidence-Based
Management Movement Keeps Rolling Along. I’ve written quite a bit about evidence-based management here, including
a post on research showing that believing
your IQ is malleable makes it more malleable, one on how
utterly useless graphology (handwriting analysis) is for screening
employees, and on evidence-based
management isn’t just about quantative evidence. Jeff Pfeffer and I also have – with a huge
amount of help from Daphne Chang at the Stanford Business School – continued to
add all kinds of new content to www.evidence-basedmanagement.com,
including some nice guest columns such as
Professor Phil Rosenzweig’s piece of The
Halo Effect and DaVita COO Joe Mello’s piece of The Myth
of the Mean.  We also got some nice
coverage for Hard
Facts in BusinessWeek
and The Wall
Street Journal.  Jeff and I will keep
adding to evidence-basedmanagement.com,
and in fact, have several guest columns that we will be rolling out over the
next month or so.

10.
A
Three-part Series at Harvard Business Online on Layoffs. I decided to end my brief career as an HBS
blogger because I just had too many other things to do, and frankly, I found it
a weirdly constraining format. But I did
develop a fairly detailed – and evidence-based –point of view on layoffs.  As I explained on this blog:  ‘I was interviewed by Carol Hymowitz at the Wall Street Journal for a story
called, "Though
Now Routine, Bosses Still Stumble During the Layoff Process," about a
month ago.  Talking with Carol inspired me to go back and review some of
the old and new research on organizational decline for a series of posts that I
did on layoffs for Harvard Business Online (See 1,
2,
and 3).
I spent a lot of time thinking about these challenges at one point, as my
earliest stream of research was on organizational decline and death (My
dissertation was on the
process of organizational death), and in 1988 Kim Cameron, Dave Whetten,
and I published a (now out of print) collection of readings on organizational
decline. I also published quite a few academic articles on the topic,
including (with Stan Harris) what might still be the only study of
funerals for dying organizations.

Alas,
with a possible recession on the way, I fear that this topic may be even more
pertinent in 2008. Don’t forget the Bain
study of layoffs during the last recession: When firms avoid doing layoffs,
they tend to recover more quickly than firms that use layoffs.

 
11.
Successful Stanford Dropouts: Quitters Sometimes Prosper. This one was really fun, as there are times
when quitting isn’t just an option, it is the best option! Ask Tiger Woods and Reese Witherspoon.

 

12
. Realists
vs. Idealists. I love this one mostly because the graphic is so cool. It also matches the message in Orbiting the Giant Hairball extremely
well. And, as I argue in the post, a case can be made that too much realism can
hamper innovation. We all need to dream
and, as Jim
March argues so well, even though dreamers fail at an alarming rate, we are
all better off for them – even the most hard-core of realists.

Finally, I’d like to mention 15
Things I Believe. I started these as a New Year’s post last year about 10
Things I Believe, and have tinkered with these ideas throughout the year.  Some are evidence-based, others are more a
reflection of what I value and hope for in life. They are listed to the left or
you can click on the link to get to a post that has the most recent list too.

I
am off until next year, and look forward to 2008 at Work Matters. Be well and,
as always, I’d love to hear your comments. In particular, if I left out something good – or especially awful – let me
know. And also let me know what you might
want to hear more about next year.

I just got this charming and heart-warming email:

Dr.
Sutton,

My grandmother is 91 this year. I
have been interviewing her attempting to gather her ingredients for living a
‘well lived life.’ See www.awojecki.typepad.com/aw

She has developed a recipe of ten
ingredients for the well lived life. Certainly, any recipe for a well-lived life
would include avoiding assholes to some degree. Her ingredients weren’t
necessarily focused on organizational structures or practices, but I think her
ingredients have resonance in shaping interpersonal perspectives on more
engaging and interesting workplaces.

I’m attempting to write a book for
her in 38 days which will be a testimony to her recipe for living the good life.
It will be her Christmas present. I’m looking for people who might be interested
in sharing some of their own ingredients for a life well lived.

What key principles, themes, or
practices do you embody in living life to its fullest? Is there a story or
example you could share?

Please feel free to pass on the
website above to others as I’m attempting to build a larger conversation on
recipes for a well lived life.

I appreciate your
time.

Cheers,

Andrew
Wojecki

I encourage people to contact Andrew and to help him with this project, as it sounds both inspiring and fun.  It reminds me of The Happiness Project, which I just love.

I guess I have two initial answers for Andrew. In general, the question of ingredients to a well-lived life are hinted at in my 15 things that I believe , which is on the main page of this blog.  But if I was to pick a single lesson or story that I’ve learned from working on The No Asshole Rule, it would be this lovely Kurt Vonnegut poem and the story surrounding it,

As I’ve written here before, here is how I set up the Vonnegut lesson in the book:

‘If you read or watch TV programs about
business or sports, you often see the world framed as place where everyone
wants “more more more” for “me me me,” every minute in every way.
The old bumper sticker sums it up: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” The
potent but usually unstated message is that we are all trapped in a life-long
contest where people can never get enough money, prestige, victories, cool
stuff, beauty, or sex – and that we do want and should want more goodies than
everyone else.

This attitude fuels a quest for constant
improvement that has a big upside, leading to everything from more beautiful
athletic and artistic performances, to more elegant and functional products, to
better surgical procedures and medicines, to more effective and humane
organizations. Yet when taken too far,
this blend of constant dissatisfaction, unquenchable desires, and overbearing
competitiveness can damage your mental health. It can lead you to treat those “below” you as inferior creatures who are
worthy of your disdain and people "above" you who have more stuff and status as
objects of envy and jealousy.

Again, a bit of framing can help. Tell yourself, “I have enough.” Certainly,
some people need more than they have, as many people on earth still need a safe
place to live, enough good food to eat, and other necessities. But too many of
us are never satisfied and feel constantly slighted, even though – by objective
standards – we have all we need to live a good life. I got this idea from a lovely little poem
that Kurt Vonnegut published in The New
Yorker called “Joe Heller,” which was about the author of the renowned
World War II novel Catch 22. As you can see, the poem describes a party
that Heller and Vonnegut attended at a billionaire’s house. Heller remarks to Vonnegut that he has
something that the billionaire can never have, "The knowledge that I’ve
got enough." These wise words
provide a frame that can help you be at peace with yourself and to treat those
around you with affection and respect:

Joe Heller  

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I’ve got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I’ve got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!"

–Kurt Vonnegut

The New Yorker,
May 16^th, 2005

P.S. If you are in a Vonnegut kind of mood, check out this great post on "15 Things that Vonnegut Said Better That Anyone Else." My favorite of the bunch — because it rings so true and is backed by so much scary research — is "We must be careful about what we pretend to be." 

The annual U.S. News & World Report college
rankings came out yesterday, with my employer,Stanford University, placing fourth, behind Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. As I was looking at the
rankings, it reminded me that when most of us think of going to college, we
automatically think that the goal is and should be to finish the degree – – that is
sure what I want for my kids!  Certainly,
that is the best goal in most cases, and there are more job openings for
students who finish their degrees than those who drop-out.

But I also think that it is
instructive – – and humbling for a faculty member like me –- to remember that
great colleges offer so many different opportunities to students to develop
skills and to build and enter social networks, that although starting a school
may have been a wise decision, a point may come where the person has such great
skill or such a great idea that dropping out to pursue their dream is also a
wise a decision. Along these lines, it
is instructive to think about some of the students who dropped-out of Stanford
and went on do great things.

My list isn’t exhaustive and if
you have others to add, I would love to hear from you.  And certainly, there are drop-outs from other
schools that have done equally well, such as Bill Gates from Harvard and Steve
Jobs from Reed College.

Of course, there are the athletes.
Exhibit one is Tiger Woods.
He played on the golf team for a couple years, and then he dropped out to
pursue his professional career. I don’t
know about you, but I think that Tiger’s decision was wise…I don’t think there
was much value in finishing that economics degree and he did win the NCAA
Individual Golf Championship when he was at Stanford. Exhibit two is tennis bad boy John McEnroe, who was at
Stanford only a year. He did help lead the tennis team to a national
championship, but after he got an endorsement deal, he soon dropped out, and
won Wimbledon a couple years later. And, course McEnroe was infamous for his
temper. Check-out this YouTube video of him going after an umpire.

Then there are the arts and
letters majors, or what Stanford students call the “fuzzies.”  A recent drop-out is Reese Witherspoon,
who went on to star in Legally Blond
and to win an Academy award for her fantastic performance in Walk the Line. Witherspoon only lasted a year at Stanford
as a literature major. Hanging around
Stanford to finish her degree, I suspect, would have slowed her acting career.

Perhaps the most famous drop-out
under this category is Nobel Prize winning writer John Steinbeck. Unlike most
drop-outs, Steinbeck didn’t hurry out of Stanford after a year or two. He hung
around sporadically from about 1921 to 1925 – writing and tasking a lot of
writing classes. He didn’t care about getting the diploma; he just cared about
writing, so he took no breadth classes.  Steinbeck got what he wanted from Stanford; he
learned to practice his craft better. As one of Steinbeck’s biographer’s reported:

“When Steinbeck needed money for his
college tuition, he did manual labor.  He worked on a dredging crew or at
the Spreckel’s sugar plant. Through his work, Steinbeck met hobos, factory
workers, and migrant fruit pickers and listened to their stories. As he
gained experiences outside of the classroom, his writing improved. Edith
Ronald Mirrielees, an English professor at Stanford, convinced Steinbeck that
he needed discipline to succeed as a writer. She crossed out his inflated phrases
and encouraged him to write shorter, more powerful sentences packed with truth.
Here, then, we have the foundations of his life as a writer.

These are the undergraduate
drop-outs, but the list of famous dropouts from our Ph.D programs is especially
impressive – and contains a lot of very rich people. I am most familiar with
the list from the Stanford Engineering School,
as that is where I have taught for 25 years. Andy Bechtolsheim dropped out to
start Sun Microsystems. As Wikipedia tells it
(and I’ve heard both Andy and Vinod tell it pretty much like this too):

At Stanford University,
Bechtolsheim had devised a powerful computer (which he called a workstation)
with built-in networking running the UNIX operating system. He developed the
workstation because he was sick of waiting for computer time on the central
University system. Khosla approached him, wanting to build a business around
selling the workstation. He also approached McNealy who was at another company
after having completed his MBA at Stanford Business School.
in 1980. They named the company Sun, derived from "Stanford University
Network." Bechtolsheim left Stanford, where he was enrolled in a
Ph.D. program, to found the company. 

Bechtolsheim
and Kholsa were joined by co-founders Scott McNealy and Bill Joy (Bill dropped
out of a UC Berkelely Ph.D program to join the team). The picture of this
founding team is to the right.

 The list of people who dropped out of Stanford to start
technology companies goes on and on. Among the most famous in recent years are Yahoo! founders David
Filo and Jerry Yang, who were the youngest donors to ever endow a chaired
professorship at Stanford, called appropriately enough the Yahoo! Founders
Chair. And then, most famously in recent years, are Google Founders Larry
Page and Serge Brin. Who dropped out of the Stanford Computer Science
Department to start what eventually became Google. See the official Google description.
There is also a lovely link among three Stanford dropouts as part of this story.
Larry and Serge tried to sell their search engine technology to a host of
companies, but couldn’t find a buyer. BUT their first investor was none other
than Andy Bechtolsheim. The Google website tells the story, but it is
one that someone tells me at least once a month around Stanford:

As Sergey tells it, "We met him very
early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a
quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing
all the details, why don’t I just write you a check?’ It was made out to Google
Inc. and was for $100,000."

The investment created a small dilemma.
Since there was no legal entity known as "Google Inc.," there was no
way to deposit the check. It sat in Larry’s desk drawer for a couple of weeks
while he and Sergey scrambled to set up a corporation and locate other funders
among family, friends, and acquaintances. Ultimately they brought in a total
initial investment of almost $1 million.

My personal favorite drop-out of the Ph.D program is my
friend David
Kelley, who after completing his Master’s Degree in Product Design, was
briefly a Ph.D. student in our Mechanical Engineering Program. David went on to
start IDEO, perhaps the most famous
innovation company in the world. But
David continued to hang around Stanford and teach classes, and eventually got a
tenure track position. David is now the Donald W. Whittier Professor of
Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, the founder of the Stanford d.school, and a
member of the National Academy of Engineering.  As with many things throughout his life, David
succeeded at Stanford by breaking the rules rather than following them – while
being warm and generous to everyone around him in the process.

Indeed, another thing that all the famous drop-outs of
the Stanford Engineering School have in common is that – although at the time
they dropped-out, no one imagined how successful and famous they would become –
all were treated with respect by Stanford faculty and administrators in the
process, which is one of the main reasons most remain so loyal to Stanford Especially in the Engineering School, where
relationships between faculty and technical companies in Silicon Valley have
always been so close (indeed, former Stanford Engineering Dean Fred Terman
loaned Stanford graduates Bill
Hewlett and David Packard $500 to start their company), “dropping-out” wasn’t
seen as a sign of failure, but as a path that seemed like a logical one to take
at the time.

The bigger lesson in all this, of course, is that the cliché
“quitters never win” is a dangerous half-truth. Although graduation is a better path for most Stanford students
(including Hewlett and Packard, in my mind, the greatest of all technology
company founders), there are quite a few out there who quit at the right
time. Moreover, some of these “quitters”
are some of Stanford’s most generous and loyal supporters.

Let me know if you have some stories about great college dropouts –
from Stanford or elsewhere – to add to the list!

P.S. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak provides
one of my favorite drop-out stories. Wozniak dropped out of my alma mater, U.C. Berkeley (#21 on the new U.S. News and Report rankings, and the
top public school) in 1975 to work for HP, develop a personal computer on the
side, and soon thereafter, start Apple Computer with Steve Jobs.  But Wozniak wanted on to finish his Berkeley degree AFTER he
was wealthy and famous. He returned in the mid 1980’s and enrolled under the
name Rocky Raccoon Clark (with permission from administrators) to protect his
identity, and graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical
engineering in 1987.

There
is a reason you haven’t seen any new postings from me lately
. My family took a lovely vacation
in the United Kingdom , where
we had a lovely time in England and Scotland.

The trip was great fun in many ways, but the
highlight was the six days we spent celebrating my father-in-law’s 75^th
birthday at the beautiful Ackergill Tower. — see the picture, it really is that beautiful.

He was kind enough to rent an old –- but extremely
well-restored — Scottish “castle” for the family.  Ackergill is almost as far north as you can
get in the United Kingdom ,
and was beautiful. I was expecting
something kind run down, but it was better than any 5 star hotel I’ve ever
stayed in, as the people who run the place were warm and went so far out of
their way to make sure that we had a great experience… doing everything from
organizing a troop of bagpipers for our final dinner to an exhibition of sheep
herding that involved 4 dogs and 16 sheep, just for our group of about 20. The Ackergill Tower isn’t easy to get to – requiring
at least 3 planes from the U.S,  Or it requires an 7 hour drive from Edinburgh, but I’d do it
again in a minute. The people were
charming and authentic (it doesn’t take long to get them talking about the
evils of British), and we were taken by watching John, one of the owners, go
out in his little boat less than 100 yards from our room and pull up his
lobster pots — and then eating them for dinner a few hours later. The weather was cold and stormy, but the
people were so delightful that we didn’t mind it a bit, and we quickly learned to
follow the Scottish motto “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate
clothing.”

For
the final formal dinner, we dressed in kilts (that’s my picture, before
everything started falling off during the dancing) and had a performance from a
group of bagpipers from nearby Wick. And the dinner started with a minister who
did the official blessing of the haggis
(which tasted remarkably good despite my reservations about eating a dish composed
of organ meats and cooked in sheep’s stomach). And – of course – the minister’s
blessing  was accompanied by a bagpiper.

I
will start blogging about workplace issues again, but our experience in the Ackergill Tower highlights an important lesson. It reminded me that we live in an era where
people talk about “designing experiences” and “authentic and caring service,”  but these are hollow words usually uttered in
an effort to extract money from us by greedy people who don’t really mean the
words and who may not understand what the words mean (I am thinking, in particular,
of some experiences I’ve had at a couple Ritz-Carlton’s where they print all
the rhetoric, but the primary aim of most interactions with most staff members
seems to be to get as big a tip out of you as possible.)  No matter how much – or little – you pay for a
place to stay, it is impossible to create that authentic warmth and caring that
we experienced at Ackergill without people in charge – and dedicated staff — who
really care about their guests.

Well,
my family is back to reality. The kids are starting school and we have jobs and
all that, but is sure was nice to get away.  I don’t expect that I will ever stay in a
place as nice as Ackergill again, as nothing before it really came close, but I
can hope!

My mother is having a a field day with this story. I am constantly trying to convince my mom to "upgrade" her taste in wines, bringing her moderately-priced fine wines from throughout the world to "break" her of buying those cheap bulk wines.  I especially turn up my nose at the $1.99 wines that they sell at Trader Joe’s under the Charles Shaw label. That much ballyhooed "Two-Buck Chuck" bottled by Bronco Wines (which is ran by Fred Franzia, who was once convicted for making fraudulent claims about the wines in his bottles). 

Well, I still can’t bring myself to run out a buy a case, but news leaked out in The Press Democrat last Thursday that Charles Shaw’s 2005 California Chardonnay beat-out 350 other chardonnays in a blind tasting conducted by a diverse group of 64 judges at the California State Fair.  Wines were rated independently of price, so this means that Two-Buck Chuck beat out many wines in the $25-$30 range, as well as quite a few that retail for over $50.

The judges are being accused of being unsophisticated.  The Press Democrat reports, "The California State Fair competition is dismissed by some critics as
representing broad-based consumer tastes rather than the palates of
true wine connoisseur."  I also claim to dislike "approachable" wines like these that are meant to appeal to mass-market tastes. But it makes me wonder — even though he was convicted of fraud — if Fred Franzia’s claim that expensive wines are often just well-marketed rip-offs has some merit. 

My mother says she is going to run out and buy a case.  I confess: I asked her to save a couple bottles for me. 

Penelope Trunk, of Brazen Careerist fame, has a stunning post on the new Huffington business blog, on Hold CEOs Accountable for Their Bad Parenting.   Don’t miss it, she just nailed it.  Check out this line:

"We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you
abandon your kids, you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you
abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine."

I love the comments that people make on Work Matters and want to do all I can to encourage everyone to keep them coming.  We are now at over 800 comments here and I can hardly wait to read the next one. The comments made in response to my last post on Southerners, Civility, and the Culture of Honor are great examples. I love the range and thoughtfulness. Everything from one commenter who sensed some homophobia in the email I put in the post (I still don’t quite see it, although the asshole is described as effeminate, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his nasty behavior)to Bill’s charming comment and story:

We Southerners – I am Virginian by birth (Like John Carter, a fighting
man of Mars!) and Tennessean by choice for many years now – are
particularly assholey when it comes to affronts to women. A young man
once accidentally bumped and spilled my wife’s tea at a big outdoor
event – he was just being exuberant and was bigger than I, and
immediately apologized – but suddenly he found this older guy telling
him in a flat voice that he needed to buy the lady another glass of
tea. I don’t know where that person was hiding in me, but he was out in
a flash.

Not bad, huh? I have learned an enormous amount — and had some good laughs — from your ideas, stories, and facts.  I have also tried to be open minded and, when people put up comments that I disagree with or that are negative.  I nearly always have leave them-up except they are spam, in extreme bad taste, or I think they might hurt someone.  But — after trying to avoid it for months — I finally decided to screen and approve comments before they go on the blog. 

The first reason is that the amount spam in these comments keep increasing — from advertisements for real estate, to porn, to travel sites.  I am getting several of these a day now. The second reason is that I have had some intermittent problems with
posts that are just a bit too nasty for my tastes.  In one case in
particular, I felt my inner jerk rising and I started composing a nasty
and arrogant reply  Fortunately, I erased it before posting it
because, well, I sounded like an asshole.  It also made me realize that
I had reached the point where it was best for my mental health to start
screening and approving comments.  Doing this bothers me a bit, as I like the idea of allowing the free
flow of ideas.  But a bit of screening seems better than unleashing a rash
of asshole poisoning here — which would be in bad taste, upset me, and
be hypocritical to boot.

I promise to get your comments up quickly (except when I am on vacation) and to approve nearly everything substantive. I say "nearly" because I reserve the right to delete stuff that is too nasty or that will turn me into temporary asshole right here on my own blog.

As always, invite your comments!

I got a nice note from Jim Brown about his Nuggets for the Noggin site; I was taken by the practical management wisdom, as well as the practical reason Jim started this adventure:

Nuggets for the Noggin was originally created to cover training
topics for the Keller Williams Realty Slidell associates.  It was my
belief that a great many real estate associates are very busy and as
such do not have the time to sit in training classes that can last up
to 3 to 6 hours long.

My recent post about the postcard that Kurt Vonnegut sent me giving permission to reprint his poem "Joe Heller"  reminded me of my favorite quote from him. I first saw it in a book called Word Redesign by J. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham, about 25 years ago:

“If
it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled
up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s
paradise.” Kurt
Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952:59)

Hackman was one the leaders of a movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s in academia and industry to humanize work, in part, by designing workplaces and jobs that were less alienating and more motivating. The research and related guidelines that Hackman and his colleagues produced remain one of the best — and most honest — examples of evidence-based management I’ve ever known. For example, when the fad was at its height, and Hackman was renowned for being one of its inventors (and no doubt deluged with offers of consulting work), he wrote an article called "On the Coming Demise of Job Enrichment." He predicted that the movement he helped start would likely fade because the practices were being implementing badly and enriched jobs were seen as a quick fix that leaders could install like machines — and then ignore after a short period of upheaval, when instead, redesigning work required constant attention and as well as a change in manager’s basic assumptions about the role of people in organizations.  Hackman especially emphasized in his writings, and still does today, that enduring and constructive change starts with viewing organizations as human and humane entities, not as machines.

P.S. Also, I would like to emphasize that, although some engineers do think the way stereotyped in the Vonnegut quote, I’ve been a faculty member at the Stanford engineering school for over 20 years, and most of my colleagues don’t think this way at all. On the contrary, I’ve been part of two start-up programs (both encouraged strongly by our deans) in the school that devote special attention to the human element in organizations: the Center for Work, Technology and Organization and the new Stanford d.school.

I wrote a post a few days ago on Asshole Revenge Stories, which talked about the virtues and dangers of exacting revenge from assholes. One of the stories was about Sue Schurman and how –when she was a bus driver in Ann Arbor, Michigan — she taught new bus drivers that a good driver never has an accident, they are all acts of skilled revenge against cars. Sue emphasized that such acts were rare, but it was the feeling that you could do it — that perception of control — that was most crucial to a bus driver’s well-being. Since that post, Sue wrote me that she has heard from a number off readers who are especially interested in how she went from bus driver to college president. Her note is great and I repeat it here:

I have been hearing from some of
your readers that they really enjoyed the story of bus drivers saving up
accidents to use as intentional punishment.  Several have asked for more
information about how I went from bus driver to president of the National Labor College. They can find a short bio on our
website www.nlc.edu. 

One point that is not clear from
your story is that while I was union president I was also Director of Driver
Training.  This happened because I had demonstrated a gift for training new
drivers.  It may have had something to do with the fact that I had a graduate
degree in education but the immediate cause was my anger at some of the guys who
trained me.  Mass transit was a male world in the early 1970s and the guys
weren’t too excited about women joining their ranks.  It was mostly just plain
old sexism but there was also a pretty good reason for them to be concerned. 
The Director of the Transit Authority had made it known that he was hiring women
because they were docile.  It was, in fact, an attempt to bust the union. 

The
joke turned out on him.  A bunch of us gals (twenty-somethings straight out of
the civil rights, women’s and anti-war movements) who were anything but docile
got ourselves hired and became the union leadership.  But the guys had a strategy
to keep us out.  They intentionally directed us into clipping telephone poles on
right hand turns.  I hit a pole my first day out.  Two older women – the only
two women there before we got there – who had learned to drive the big buses
(technically they are called motor coaches) took me in hand and showed me how to
make a proper turn using the mirrors.  I never had another preventable accident
and vowed to teach others myself so that they wouldn’t have this same
experience.

I got to be both union president and
training director even though the boss wanted this to be a management position
because my method of training worked.  During my tenure as training director we
cut the accident rate at least in half.  Having the psychological safety valve
was most likely part of it.  But training really helps
too.

I only knew Sue during a few years of this transition, in the early 1980’s. We had a lot of fun writing our paper on studying emotionally hot topics (she worked with me on my dissertation on the process of organizational death and we talked to a lot upset people) and she was one of the smartest and most fun co-author’s I’ve had. And she has a LOT of talents.  When we were writing that paper she was also finishing-up her Ph.D and was the executive director of the local humane society. I remember her talking about how she wanted to write an article about the experience called "Teaching an Old Dog Pound New Tricks."  I am not sure she ever did it, as doing things like running a college it time consuming, but it sure was a good title. I am glad that Sue has done so well, but I am not surprised because, as you can see, she is smart woman that doesn’t put-up with any nonsense!