Category: The No Asshole Rule

Dieter Prucker over at the Cantankerous Consultant has done a little original artwork with cover of The No Asshole Rule, and proposed that perhaps the reason that Circuit City fired 3400 associates (their highest performers, with the longest tenure — and replaced them with cheaper newbies and part-timers) was that the CEO heard of the book, and misread the title as "The No Associate Rule."   He is joking, but as he shows, it isn’t very funny. This is the kind of thing that happens when someone has a spreadsheet, but no heart — and if you see the research in Jeff Pfeffer’s Human Equation, perhaps no brain either.  I do love the modified cover, however. 

P.S. Even worse than being a "pro-asshole" company is letting assholes rule the roost, but still claiming that you have a no asshole rule.  Then you come across as having an asshole infested company AND being hypocrite. See this post about Holland & Knight as an example.  Circuit City seems to have achieved a similar, or perhaps worse, level of hypocrisy, because — even though they fired them for being too expensive — their corporate propaganda ("Circuit City  values") apparently still claims under the heading of "respect" that ""Our associates are our greatest assets."  If you add the their actions together with this statement, it appears that senior management are both greedy assholes and hypocrites; or perhaps they never read their own values statment.

C. K. Gunsalus is the former Associate Provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently a Special Counsel and  Adjunct Professor of Law and Medicine at the university.  C.K., or Tina as she goes by in less formal communication, has published an extremely useful and most very engaging Harvard University Press book called The College Administrator’s Survival Guide, which draws heavily on her years of experience as an academic administrator. It also sports an inspired cover, as you can see. The book has one great chapter after another about the challenges of being a university administrator — on topics ranging from "Embrace your fate," to "negotiation," to "complaints."  Being a university administrator is a tough job because, among other things, these folks get so much responsibility and have so little authority. It is also a tough job because  — at a university  like Illinois or Stanford  — so many of the biggest problems are caused by tenured faculty and staff members who are extremely hard to discipline, let alone to fire for poor performance or outrageous behavior.  I was especially interested in Tina’s chapter on bullies, as managing abusive faculty and staff can be very difficult, both because they have so much job security, and as she points out, they are rarely confronted because universities are accepting of human quirks (which can be a very good thing) and people are afraid to confront them (which can be a very bad thing).   I get a lot of emails from people in education — from elementary school principals to college presidents — that ask about the challenges of asshole management when their people have a huge amount of job security (tenure, union representation, and often both).  And I have received a number of similar questions from people who work in government jobs lately as well. If you face such challenges, I recommend her book highly.

I’ve also been communicating with Tina because she is (I believe) the first person to adopt The No Asshole Rule as a text for a college class — an MBA class on Leadership and Ethics with over 100 students that she is teaching right now.  Tina has sent me several encouraging reports about student reactions to the book (I invite Tina and her students to make some comments, as you should never trust an author who reports that people like his or her book).  I’ve appreciated her reports and would love to hear more. But the email that she sent me yesterday (reproduced in full below) is going to be hard to top.  Her students sound like they have both wit and humor.  I read it to my wife and kids yesterday, and they just cracked-up:

Dear Bob,

We’re three weeks into our MBA class on Leadership and Ethics, in which we’re using your book as one of our texts.

We had a lovely moment in class today you might appreciate.  We had a guest speaker, who had scanned the syllabus upon arriving in the classroom.

The speaker said, at one point, something along the lines of "I see you’re reading a book by Bob Sutton with a word in the title I simply detest."

An unidentified student in the back of the room (there are more than 100 people in this class) yelled out:

"Yeah, I hate the word ‘rule’, too,"

Thought you might enjoy this moment.

Cheers.

Tina

Aaron Mentele of Electric Pulp just gave me the latest numbers for Asshole Rating Self-Exam, or ARSE Test has hit "74,524 completions now with the average score being 5.14 (which is just enough
inside the "borderline asshole" category.)"  There is still a lot self-examination going on out there, and as I’ve written about before, some people have used to assess others, including the guy who took it "for" his VP then quit his job after the VP hit 23 of the 24 asshole moves on the test!

I
have not been surprised that some people have reacted negatively to
the title of The No Asshole Rule. I wrote about a few of these complaints in Why
I Call Them Assholes and in “amusing
poetic vitriol,” about the wonderful nasty letter that a reader sent to the
San Francisco Chronicle. I also am not especially surprised that, in
response to Lisa Cullen’s Time Magazine
column
and blog
about the book (in which she sung the praises of assholes, and used the word in
uncensored form), that at least one person threatened to cancel his 25-year
subscription to Time (although other
people told him to “get over it.”). And I
wasn’t surprised — but was amused — when a woman recently wrote me that her boss asked her to take
the book home because the title might upset her co-workers (She implied that
his overt justification was the title, but the real reason probably was because he is a nasty boss.)

I was
a little more surprised to learn that Josh Quittner, the Editor of Business 2.0, predicted to my friend and
frequent co-author (a 2.0 columnist) Jeff Pfeffer last December that my dirty
title would “severely limit sales.”  I
just learned of this prediction in an “I told you so” e-mail that Jeff sent
Josh recently (Jeff has an excellent memory and is usually right, a dangerous
combination). Of course, we haven’t done
the alternative experiment — trying to sell the same book with a clean title
— but the dirty title does seem to be attracting people more people than it is
repelling.  It is on a number of best
seller lists: Friday’s Wall Street
Journal listed it as the #3 business Book and #14 non-fiction book, and as Guy Kawasaki
discussed on his blog, I wouldn’t accept offers from publishers who wanted the
book, but didn’t want the title, because I believed in it so strongly.

A
bigger surprise, however, is how many positive reactions I have received from
religious people, especially devout Christians, about the book. The first time this happened was in January,
when I got an e-mail from an editor at Chrismon, a magazine published by
the Lutheran Church in Germany (and mailed to 1.5 million Germans). He wanted to interview me for a story about
Der Arschloch-Faktor. I frankly thought, at first,
that either it was a joke, or he was going to write a negative story. But he explained
to me that, in his view, The No Asshole
Rule was really quite closely related to the Golden Rule, and that if you
looked closely at the teachings of Christ, the main points of the book were
quite consistent.  A positive story appeared in
the March issue. 

I have since received at least 20 emails from people who make a
similar point, including several from a woman who suggested that we work together
on a version of the book that contained footnotes to biblical sources
that supported the assertions and advice — and that contained a bible study guide to go
with the book. Finally, a few weeks back, Richard Beck wrote a post on his blog, Experimental Theology, called 1
Corinthians and the No Asshole Rule.  Beck started out by saying:

Two weeks ago it was my turn to
teach my adult bible class at church. We are going through 1 Corinthians and I
was up to teach the famous Chapter 13, "Love is patient, love is
kind…"

And I thought to myself,
"Richard, what are you possibly going to say in class that hasn’t been
said before about 1 Corinthians 13?"

Then it hit me. I started the class by doing a
book review and reading selections from Dr. Robert Sutton’s new book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and
Surviving One That Isn’t.

Beck
went to say argue that my two tests for determining if a person is an asshole
are in direct agreement with 1 Corinthians, and ended the post by saying:

So, we reflected on all this in my Sunday School class. And
after reflection on the No Asshole Rule, I read these famous words:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is
not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it
keeps no record of wrongs…

Basically, don’t be an asshole.

I
confess that I like his logic, but I don’t trust my reaction.  If anyone can help me sort this out, I would
appreciate it – talking dirty in a way that seems to please at least some
religious people is quite a shock!

P.S.
I also should confess that I stole this heading from an InformationWeek
article about the work done by
our d.school students to spread Firefox. They used this title because one team developed a website called Firefoxies.com, where models posted their
sometimes sexy pictures.  In contrast, the "sacred" website, Faithbrowser.com, is a tool for customizing your Firefox browser so that it has Christian graphics and
presents an ever changing set of quotes from the bible.

The No Asshole Rule talks about testosterone poisoning as a kind of joke. Apparently, it is a real affliction that turns people into assholes. Here is the lead to the story:

While most people are upset or concerned when someone gives them an angry look, there are others — with high levels of testosterone — who actually enjoy angry expressions and seek ways to provoke them, new research suggests.

"It’s kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a non-conscious level can be like a tasty morsel that some people will vigorously work for," study co-author Oliver Schultheiss, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said in a prepared statement.

Note that this finding appears to hold for both men and women.

Read the rest of the story: Some People Find Angry Expressions Rewarding.

The implication: Perhaps if you want to keep assholes out of your organization, you need to take a blood test (and measure their testosterone levels) and their ARSE Test score!

Aric Press, the editor of the American Lawyer, has told me that he believes that large law firms are prone to breeding and encouraging demeaning behavior.  He wrote an editorial about this problem when my Harvard Business Review essay on the rule came out in 2004 and printed a long excerpt from the book in the American Lawyer.  Of course, law firms aren’t the only places that can turn nasty — in fact, there is a lot of evidence that nurses, medical students, and residents face especially persistent abuse — but this report from a legal secretary at a large law firm really caught my attention. I have removed the opening and ending, and of course, her name, but edited nothing else:

I am a legal secretary who has
worked with countless assholes my entire working life.  Attorneys, upper management and even staff and
secretaries who demean and poison the workplace with their vindictiveness,
competitiveness and general lack of respect for others.  I have found that management’s "solution" to
dealing with these types of people is that YOU must tip toe around them because
" … well, you know how he/she
is".  Now how much sense does that
make?!  I wish I had the money to
purchase hundreds of copies of your book, along with your "asshole
quiz" and send them, (anonymously of course!), to every asshole I’ve ever
worked with – like the partner I’ve worked with who never ever looks at me,
speaks to me or acknowledges that I exist. 
I HATE this asshole.  Or the attorney who wishes I
could "meet his needs better" when he NEVER communicates with me at
all.  Or the female attorney who will rips me to shreds when the
printer malfunctions but expects humor and compassion when she makes a mistake
of her own or the bullying senior partner who gets away with making mincemeat
out of underlings by screaming and hollering at them because he/she brings in
so much business for the firm.  It’s
sick.

The damage done is scary.  One of the main things I’ve learned since publishing the book is that organizations would be wise to devote less energy to fighting the war for talent and more energy to finding ways to avoid wasting and ruining the talent that they already have.

Last summer, I posted one of my favorite "asshole management stories" after hearing a funny — and fascinating — report from an executive named Bill about the technique that his colleague, Marge, uses in meetings. I called this technique "Marge's Asshole Management Metric."  It generated a lot of discussion and some disagreement.  I just heard from Bill, who tells me that they are still using Marge's method at his company and it continues to be highly effective.  In case you missed it the first time, here is the original post:

Peter Finch, who hosts the morning show on local San Francisco rock radio station station KFOG,  interviewed Lars Dalgaard of SuccessFactors and me for this fun little piece. 

Hit the link or get it here: Download Fogfilesaholes.mp3

It is a lot more fun than the usual radio interview. It is airing four or five times this week.

P.S. As he talks about in the piece, Lars Dalgaard is the only CEO I know who insists that new empoyees sign a contract agreeing not to act an asshole — other places have the rule,  but Lars is most direct about it.

Today’s edition of the New York Post has a long story on The No Asshole Rule by Chris Erikson, called New Jerk City.  The main story does a nice job of summarizing the book’s main points, along with the range of reactions that it has generated — as it says, I never thought I would write a book that result in an appearance on a "shock jock" radio show like Mancow, a forthcoming article in the respectable McKinsey Quarterly, and as a reading in a bible studies class.  There is also a sidebar on "surviving snakes" which is based on my longer post on "Tips for Surviving Asshole Infested Workplaces."

The best part of the package, however, is the sidebar about HBS Professor Boris Groysberg’s research which shows that, even in investment banking, enforcing the no asshole rules pays dividends. Note Boris’s clever test for assessing if a culture is no-asshole or pro-asshole:

CULLING THE CREEPS

There are industries that put a premium on genteel, courteous behavior. And then there’s investment banking.

"If there was a poster child for an industry where jerks are
tolerated, it would be investment banking," is how Harvard Business
School professor Boris Groysberg puts it.

Which is why during a long-term study of top investment banking
firms, Groysberg and his partner, Ashish Nanda, were somewhat surprised
to find that those who enforced a "no a – – hole rule" reaped clear
dividends.

"Firms that have policies of maintaining a nonhostile work
environment have done much better overall than firms where complete
jerks are tolerated," says Groysberg, who was studying whether the
success of "superstars" crossed over when they moved from one firm to
another. "So what we found was very similar to what Bob [Sutton]
describes in his book."

For starters, Groysberg and Nanda found that such firms have
significantly lower turnover. And employees were willing to work there
for less money.

"To be in a friendly work environment, people would work at a
significant discount from what they could get just by crossing the
street," he says.

Groysberg is too diplomatic to name the worst
offenders, but cites Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs as the most
vigilant about weeding out jerks. Having spent a fair amount of time at
various firms while doing his research, he says the difference in
culture between such firms and those that let jerks run wild can be
clear to see.

"I found that if you just sit quietly in the dining room and
observe how food gets ordered and how people eat and interact, in half
an hour you can tell if this particular culture is more a – –
hole-friendly than others," he says. – C.E

Rob Cross is a Professor at the University of Virginia and has done A LOT of great academic work and work with companies on social networks. Rob is a driving force behind the The Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia, a consortium of companies and researchers that are interested in learning more about and applying network analysis techniques. Check out their website for all sorts of information.  Rob and Andrew Park also have written a great –and useful — book called The Hidden Power of Social Networks.

All of Rob’s work is interesting, but I am especially taken by the research that he and his colleagues have done on "energizing" vs. "de-energizing" interactions.  They have done a series of studies showing, to oversimplify a bit, that employees who tend to leave others feeling energized after interactions  get better performance evaluations, advance more rapidly, and spark more innovation when compared to "de-energizers" (people who bring other’s down, who leave them feeling sapped).  I am fascinated by this research because I define assholes, in large part, as people who leaves others feeling demeaned and de-energized.  So this means that, although my book and lots of other writings contain lists of actionsthat cause people to feel demeaned (yelling, teasing, glaring, treating people as if they are invisible), Rob’s approach suggests that a more elegant and powerful way to measure whether some is an asshole is to simply ask how people feel after a single interaction (energized or de-energized? demeaned or esteemed?) and after a series of interactions: The first being a measure of if someone is a temporary asshole; the second being a measure of if someone is a certified asshole.

Rob wrote me and explained the single question they use to determine if a person is experienced by others in his or network as an "energizer" or a "de-energizer. This is amazing stuff to me because it is so simple, and these effects on others explain so much about how people propel — poison — the people in their networks and their own careers (Important note: Do not use this question for research without getting permission from Rob and then giving him credit):

People can affect the energy and enthusiasm we have at work in various ways. Interactions with some people can leave you feeling drained while others can leave you feeling enthused about possibilities. When you interact with each person below, how does it typically affect your energy level?

Response Scale:

      1 = De-energizing

      2 = No effect/Neutral

      3 = Energizing

To measure if a person is an asshole, I believe that there are only one or two additional questions required. Something like "After you interact with this person, do you typically feel better about yourself, worse about yourself, or roughly the same?"  Or, "after you interact with this person, do you feel esteemed, demeaned, or about the same?"  The blend of the energy question and one of these should be a nice way to assess if someone leaves people who are energized and esteemed (a constructive energizer, an anti-asshole) or de-energized and demeaned (a certified asshole, especially if it is a pattern).

I am trying to figure out some ways and places to measure this stuff, and am hoping to recruit Rob to help as has some really cool software that he uses with the companies that he works with and that are partners in his network. The thing I like about this method is that it is so simple, and Rob’s pile of research shows that it will likely work for detecting assholes as well.  Of course, the methods used by researchers who studying bullying and psychological abuse are also useful, as they look at what assholes do not on what they "do to" people (teasing, yelling, taunting, glaring and all that).  By combining the two approaches, a pretty complete picture of what assholes do and what they do to others should emerge.

Check out the work done by Rob and his colleagues.  It is great stuff.