Category: The No Asshole Rule

I have written in-depth about "Why I call them assholes," why for me, no other word captures the emotions I feel when I am the victim of a demeaning creep, when I see others being abused by some jerk, or when the word I apply to myself when I have been nasty schmuck.  I also understand that the word does offend some people and that they object to my dirty language.  I always say (to steal phrase from William Wrigley Jr., of chewing gum fame), that "when two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary," so I respect people who object to my dirty title and I admire them for speaking-up.

I especially admire people who complain eloquently.  Last Saturday, February  24th, the San Francisco Chronicle published a long story by Jessica Guynn called "Crusade Against The Jerk at Work."   A reader from Palo Alto was apparently quite offended, and wrote a great letter to the Chronicle in protest. Mark Fortier, who is working with me to help promote the book, called it "amusing poetic vitriol:"

Editor — You may call him a respected Stanford professor
("Crusade against the jerk at work,” Feb. 24), but I call Robert Sutton a fallen educator, who
has descended into the vulgarity and coarseness of our times.

The red-faced Chronicle is too embarrassed to repeat his book’s
unexpurgated title. The subject matter may be valid, but the odor of crudity and
grossness has now seeped like sewage into our bastions of learning. Such low
language from a Ph.D. is typical of the foul-mouthed, tasteless vulgarity that
has corrupted television, radio, newspapers and other media with offensiveness
and obscene billingsgate we used to hear from the mouths of naughty boys.

Sure, Sutton will sell a laxative of books with his sleazy title,
but why slander that vital organ of our body? This will come to no good end.

VIC BEFERA

Palo Alto

I don’t agree with Mr. Befera, but his writing is charming and funny. I would also add that one of the lessons that I learned from my product design friends like David Kelley is that, in creating something, the aim isn’t always to please people, it is to make them them feel alive, to think about themselves and  what they value and believe. In this vein, I am heartened by the strength of the emotional response to the book, and appreciate Mr. Befera’s response just as much as the woman who wrote me about how she and her co-workers used "asshole diaries" to drive out the local bully.

P.S. I don’t know how Mr. Befera would feel about it, but I am pleased to report that a Reuter’s story "Author Puts Focus on Office Bullies and Jerks" just came out that prints the uncensored title.  The picture to the left was printed with the title, I just love it.   

My wife — an attorney — always emphasizes that if anything bad is happening to you, and you want your organization, your boss, or your attorney to help you do something about it, vague and emotional complaints won’t help very much. And even having one, well-documented example won’t help very much either.  What you need is a documented history of the bad stuff that is happening AND it is even better if you can recruit others to document the bad stuff as well, because that way it is far tougher to dismiss you as a "nut case."

I got an email earlier in the week from a government worker who explained how she used an asshole diary to document the actions of an abusive co-worker, recruited others to do the same, and then, the asshole seemed to mysteriously disappear.  Here is an edited version of the quote, to protect her identity. Read it closely, it is the model of how to fight back against an asshole — and to put your managers, HR Department, and their lawyers in a position where they have plenty of ammunition to help you, and if they elect not to help you, you have plenty of ammunition to use against them.

I have spent the
afternoon reading your book The No Asshole Rule and plan to copy pages and
paste them to my locker at work. I have worked [at a government agency] for four
years and encountered the asshole of all assholes very early on. I won’t
go into all the horrible things she did but will instead share how I and her
other victims decided to respond to her. After months of
being tormented by her and her "posse’"and comforting other tearful
victims, I decided to document her behavior. I kept a little notebook
in my pocket and wrote down her behaviors that were racist, slanderous,
threatening, etc.  I documented the many harmful things she did with dates
and times…..basically I kept an "Asshole
Journal."  I encouraged her other victims to do so too and these
written and signed statements were presented to our supervisor.

Our supervisors knew this worker was an
asshole but didn’t really seem to be doing anything to stop her harmful behaviors
until they received these statements. The asshole went on a mysterious leave
that no supervisor was permitted to discuss and she never returned.   I wanted to share my story about the
asshole journals.  It was a lot of work and there were moments where I was very
fearful but it all worked out in the end.

I applaud this woman for her
courage and wisdom. This is one of my favorite “fighting back” stories.

I have been asked a lot of question lately about the best way to confront an asshole. There are times when this isn’t a good idea, as it may inflame or anger them even more, and you can get hurt.  And, of course, one of the worst things you can do is to call an asshole an asshole (in most cases, I have some close friends who can tell me that, and need to tell me so now and then, and I listen because they are usually  right).

It works best when people don’t realize how nasty they are being and a polite but firm message can bring them to their senses. I have received a couple emails lately from a fashion model about some of the backstage stage nastiness that goes on in that business.  She told me a great story about how she used a respectful but firm message to stop the venom from spewing out of another model:

I took a stand last weekend while one was screaming at me in my
face, I simply smiled and said: “When you are rational enough to carry on this
conversation without screaming I might be willing to listen, But I WILL NOT
TOLERATE YOU TO SCREAM AT ME IN THIS ABUSIVE MANNER.” Then I walked away. She
ran after me and hugged me and said she was sorry.

Polite but firm confrontations don’t always end this happily, but there is an art to conveying to people that you won’t take their abuse any longer in a way that they can "hear" the message, and this model shows the right way to do this; indeed, I heard a similar argument from Ron Reagan (the president’s son) when he interviewed me for his radio show last year. He described how he pushed back during the years that he was a dancer to abusive directors, and how it was often an effective way to convince them to be civil.  Ron said that his attitude was “You can criticize my work, and I’ll try to
improve, but attacking me is unacceptable or I will leave.”  Not bad!  

The Asshole Rating Self-Exam (or ARSE) continues to boom along.  The folks at Electric Pulp tell me that things in the interview keep booming along:

5OLessons makes high quality videos with leaders of various kinds — business leaders, government, and academics — and sells them online.  Adam Sodowick and his folks from 50Lessons came by Stanford last year and filmed me talking about five different short "lessons" — things like "smart talk trap" from The Knowing-Doing Gap and the virtues of evidence-based management for Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense.  And, of course, I talked about The No Asshole Rule as well. 

Adam has been kind enough to make this short 4:42 video on the no asshole rule available for free online, even though 50Lessons is in the business of selling these things.  I received several emails over the weekend saying it was broken, but I am pleased to say it is fixed.  This video has apparently been viewed a lot, when you put "no asshole rule" into a Google search, it pops-up second (after the Amazon page) out of nearly 250,000 hits.

Adam, thanks for fixing it!

The Brazen Careerist columnist Penelope Trunk —  who writes for both the Boston Globe and Yahoo! — was kind enough to mention the book and to provide a link to the ARSE test in her recent column on "Finding Work that You Love."   Aaron Mentele at Electric Pulp reports that Penelope’s Yahoo! column is driving a lot of the recent traffic to the ARSE test, which he reports is up to 36,459 unique views and 22,343 completions. So the self-examination continues! 

P.S. Penelope  has a book coming out in May also called Brazen Careerist.  I just read the advanced copy last week and it is a delightful book, with some edgy advice that made me squirm a bit at times.  I agreed with 90% of it, found myself arguing with the other 10%, and was completely engaged from start to finish. I will write a longer review as publication gets closer.

P.P.S. Penelope — and I suspect the Maxium Radio Show with Bower where they encouraged me to say "asshole" over and over again, talked a lot about the test — are having an effect. Aaron tells me we are up to 31,430 total completions and 51,350 total unique visits  — this almost 10,000 more in less than 24 hours!

The
current New Yorker has a compelling and disheartening story by James B. Stewart called "The Kona Files" about the nasty conflict and leaks to the press on the
Hewlett-Packard board of directors that unfolded in 2005 and 2006. This internal mudslinging and mistrust culminated in chairman of the board Patricia Dunn and
several others being charged with multiple felony counts in the "pretexting" or spying scandal.  It isn’t available
online, but Stewart story alone is worth the price of the magazine.  I won’t go into the twists and turns, although
I can say it does present a convincing case that Dunn is getting a raw deal and
that billionaire Tom
Perkins€“ — who resigned from the board in a rage when he found out that HP
was spying on board members — acted like an arrogant jerk throughout the
process. And the whole thing is also sad because  Dunn is not only fighting felony charges, she is fighting  ovarian cancer at the same time.

The
thing that struck me most strongly about the article was that — while accounts vary
and finger pointing is rampant — everyone seems to agree that anger, mistrust,
and personal animosity raged throughout the board for years. Dunn and Perkins had nasty run-ins about
everything from how much board attention should be devoted to complying with
Sarbanes-Oxley requirements to Dunn’s hesitation to say something nice about
Perkins steamy novel €œSex
and the Single Zillionaire.  Ousted
HP CEO Carly Fiorina, €“ who was interviewed for the story, reported that she
had breakfast with her replacement, Mark Hurd, in April, 2006 (it was the first
time the two ever met). Hurd told
Fiorina that he was "exasperated by tensions within the board" and that there
were occasions when "board members had almost come to blows."

I
don’t fully believe what anyone involved in this mess says, as there is so much
self-interest, posturing for a forthcoming trial, and so much emotion that it
is hard to know what actually happened. But the thing that strikes me is this a
cautionary tale about group dynamics and how bad they can get. The people involved in this drama are all
extremely smart and accomplished, and most have a history of quite sensible
behavior. But when conflict, anger, and rampant mistrust started flying, they
all seemed to turn into stubborn and vindictive idiots.

There
is a huge literature on group dynamics that has ideas about how to repair such
groups. You might start with J. Richard Hackman’€™s Leading
Teams if you want to learn some of this stuff. And therapists can be effective at helping
dysfunctional groups – indeed, the HP board clearly needed a therapist. The best and most vivid example I know of an
effective group therapist is in the film about the heavy metal rock group
Metallica, called €œSome
Kind of Monster. Check it out;
that rock group’s psychologist might have helped that HP board.

Now,
for a short "€œasshole analysis:" What would I suggest to friend who was on that
board€“ or anyone else in a situation like this where the asshole poisoning is
so severe? Get out as fast as you can and get as far away from those people as you
can: Only bad things will happen to you if you stick around. It will probably make you physically sick and
almost certainly turn you into an asshole like the rest of them.  Sometimes it might be worth it to you, or your organization, to battle it out, but as I read this story, I mostly saw people trapped in a vicious circle that just got nastier and nastier — and stopping such cycles is mighty hard and, even when accomplished, nearly always damages everyone involved in some manner.

The San Francisco Chronicle story today on Crusade Against the Jerk at Work has provoked a delightful — and sometimes troubling — deluge of emails from a lot of people who have been victimized by assholes and a few who plead guilty to being assholes. One of my favorites came from a wine importer who explained how they deal with demeaning customers:

"In my business, we have a rule that says that a customer can either be an arsehole (I’m English originally) or a late pay, but not both. We have reduced stress considerably by excluding some customers on this basis."

The book talks about how one of  cost of being a jerk is that customers start charging "asshole taxes" that the bully or brute may not even realize are happening. This is a great example.

The No Asshole Rule focuses on workplace bullies, but of course, this is a problem that pervades many other corners of life: schools, churches, families, people who are in institutions like nursing homes and elder care facilities, and on and on. I just got a note about Thru the Looking Glass, an award winning blog about the problem of bullying, which appears aimed at helping victims cope with such problems, and to stamp out the problem in general.  It contains links to a lot of useful resources and has numerous compelling posts.  Plus the reason that this blog was started really got my attention:

"I began to research bullying on the Internet to understand why a frail
senior recovering from a serious illness had become the target of
bullying. When those nearest and dearest attempted to defend her and
ask for the abuse to stop, the abuser worked her venom on them. Thus
began our research into why and how this could happen to one so
vulnerable. Our research was enlightening and we want to share that
with you."

Alas, there also appears to be a workplace angle, as elder abuse is often committed by employees of the institutions that are supposed to care for them.   And I do believe that part of the solution is to build organizations that screen out bullies, train people how to deal with difficult people and challenging clients without bullying them, and punish and expel chronic offenders. So there does seem to be an intersection here with the ideas in The No Asshole Rule, albeit one I confess I have barely thought about.

Our leading local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has a front page story today "Crusade Against the Jerk at Work." In the print version, it sort of looks like Hillary Clinton is standing
on my head. And the picture here — which is in the newspaper and
online — is from a talk that I gave at Yahoo! earlier in the week. Jessica Guynn, the Chronicle staff writer who did the piece was great to work with, not only because she is smart and fun, but because she cared so much about getting the facts right. In an age where many writers don’t seem very careful, Jessica  was delightfully detail oriented. Lars from SuccessFactors and Diego Rodriguez from IDEO play prominent parts in the story, I am happy to report.

P.S. My mother is especially happy about the story as our family has subscribed to the Chronicle since the early 1960s when we moved from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay area.