Category: The No Asshole Rule

Why I Call Them Assholes: Updated

I recently did a video "book brief" for BNET about The No Asshole Rule and received a few strong complaints about the title — the strongest in a long time. I responded, but I also thought that I would update my original blog posting on the topic. I have received some complaints now and then since the book was published, as you can see in my Publisher’s Weekly piece and this wonderful letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. But as I have written here, I am mostly shocked by how few people object to the term, and by some of the places — like this bible study class — that use the word openly. Nonetheless, as I am getting more push back on the title than I have in awhile, I thought I would re-run a post that I put-up last October, before the book was published, on "Why I Call Them Assholes." I’ve edited it just slightly. In particular, check-out the comments from readers; they are wonderful. Here goes:

I confess that I have received surprisingly few
complaints about publishing a book titled The
No Asshole Rule (or if you speak German, Der
Arschloch-Faktor). One of the most surprising things about the
experience of writing the book, selling it to publishers, and now talking about
it to various people, is how few complaints I’ve received about the somewhat
dirty title. Perhaps the most serious complaint was from the Harvard
Business School Press (HBSP), whose editors wanted to publish the book as long as I
changed to a more respectable title — something I declined do. Jeff and I have had a fantastic
experience with HBSP on our current book,
Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, and I would
recommend them to any business author. But I found their negative reaction to the title a bit amusing because
my original essay on the rule (called “More Trouble Than They Are Worth") was
published in their sister publication the Harvard
Business Review, and it contained the word “asshole” 7 or 8 times. In their defense, the Harvard brand is one
that smacks of respectability and even a touch of stuffiness. And as I told them when they tried to get me
to change the title, if I was in management at the Harvard Business School
Press, I wouldn’t publish a book with “Asshole” in the title either, as even if
it sold well, it would be bad for their brand image. So off I went to other publishers, and I’ve
been delighted with Warner Business Books.

I haven’t had many complaints since. I have done media interviews where they requested
that I use the word “jerk.” When I did a radio
interview with Ron Reagan, he let me use the word “a-hole.” Just recently, though, I had a complaint that
really got me thinking about why I use the word, and if it is a wise and civil
thing to do. A couple weeks ago, BusinessWeek published a “centerfold”
story about my perspective on brainstorming and a list of eight brainstorming
tips based on my research and experience with creative teams. In the story,
they (without censoring the title) were kind enough to say that my next book is
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized
Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t. The story provoked a most thoughtful e-mail from one reader:

One thing
caught my eye, though: If it isn’t too late, get a new title for your
upcoming book. Vulgarism has no place in serious business. It
weakens your ideas and diminishes your credibility. Maybe you could
brainstorm with some of your colleagues and come up with a better one.

This critique got me
thinking about why I was using this “vulgarism.” Was I just being cute? Was I
doing it to sell books? Certainly, I
plead guilty to that charge — it would be a lie to deny that. Was I doing
it because I am a vulgar person? That
might be true too, but the other books and articles that I write rarely contain
dirty talk.

There are two main reasons why, at least for me, no
other word works as well for describing these demeaning and mean-spirited
people. The first reason has to do with authenticity
and the second follows from my goal of affecting what people actually think about and
do in organizations.

To start with authenticity, when I tangle with
nasty person, I don’t think “what a jerk” or “what an abusive person.” The first thing that comes to mind is “what
an asshole.” That is also the word that
nearly everyone I know uses to describe these creeps, even though they may
later censor it. In The No Asshole Rule, for example, I describe a law firm that actively
enforces what they call a "no jerk rule" in media reports, but when I talked to a senior partner, he confirmed
that, they call the people that they screen out “assholes” rather than
jerks. And just the other day, my wife
was talking with an attorney who specializes in labor law litigation, and this
attorney was amused to hear the title of my forthcoming book because so many potential clients that
she turns away are really complaining about working for assholes, not about
sexual harassment or discrimination. This
attorney reported that “asshole” is the word that her potential clients often use
and nearly always really mean — and she turns most away because it probably
isn’t unlawful to be an equal opportunity asshole in most places, despite all
the damage they do.

Finally,
another sign that that this phrase is authentic from both an intellectual and
emotional standpoint came, to my surprise, in an email that I received
from an accomplished researcher who studies emotional abuse in the
workplace. As I say the book, she wrote,
“Your work on the ‘no asshole rule’ has certainly resonated with my colleagues
and me. In fact, we often speculate that
we would be able to predict a large proportion of variance in job satisfaction
with one ‘flaming asshole item.’ Basically, if we could ask whether your boss is
one, we would not need any other [survey] items. …. Thus, I agree that while
potentially offensive, no other word quite captures the essence of this type of
person.”

We teach our Ph.D. students at Stanford in the Center for
Work, Technology and Organization who do ethnographies of the workplace
that using foul language is sometimes necessary for providing accurate and
realistic descriptions of what people say and how they feel. I believe that –
in terms of both descriptive and emotional accuracy – other words are simply
inferior for describing how persistently demeaning people act and, especially,
the feelings they unleash in their victims.

My second argument is that, since my aim is to help
people understand how to spot these demeaning creeps, understand the damage
they do, and how to build civilized organizations that screen-out, reform and
expel nasty people, I should use language that people will remember and spread.
After all, as Chip and Dan Heath show so
brilliantly in their forthcoming book Made
to Stick, no matter how good an idea is, if it isn’t “sticky,” if it isn’t
something that people talk about, recall persistently, and gets them excited,
then it can’t have any impact on what they do. Chip and Dan show how “sticky ideas” are
embedded in Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credentialed, Emotional Stories that
Stick – which boils down to SUCCESS, one of the few “evidence-based acronyms”
I’ve ever seen. I won’t lead you through
a detailed march through these seven standards, but I do think that the phrase “The
No Asshole Rule” fits their standards for a sticky idea better than, say, the “no
nastiness,” “no bully,” or no “psychological abuse” rule – particularly because
it is more emotional and more concrete than other phrases, it easier to weave
into stories that “stick” with people, and it provokes an array of depressing,
funny, and touchy stories from other people as well.

Again, perhaps I am just trying to justify or
glorify my vulgar language or crass desire to sell books, but I believe that
these other arguments about authenticity and stickiness are sound too – – with
all due respect to the thoughtful person who gently chastised me in that e-mail.

P.S. Another reason that, at least for me, that no other word works as well that when I am acting like a nasty creep (I plead guilty, it does happen), I don;t say to myself "Gee Bob, you are acting like a jerk." I say to myself "You are acting like an asshole. Stop it." So — again to be authentic — this is what I call myself when I’ve been bad to help gain a bit of self-control, not some sanitized word.

October 2, 2006
The No Asshole Rule at SuccessFactors

I wrote a post a few months back on The No Asshole Rule Reaches New Heights, which described how CE0 Lars Dalgaard enforced the rule at SuccessFactors, a global softwate companies with headquarters in San Mateo, California. You may recall that he has employees sign contracts in which they
commit to not acting like assholes. I’ve got an update: The rule
seems to be working and is part of the company’s current success. Check out Succcesfactors list of five founding principles that Dalgaard spelled out when he started the company in 2001 — "No Assholes" is number 5. Now that is my kind of CEO! This story has lovely implications for entrepreneurship. I’ve had at least half-a-dozen entrepreneurs tell me that they used the no asshole rule as one of their founding principles, but all told me that — although they used the word "asshole" when talking about who they wanted to hire, fire, and so on — they used more polite language to describe it in written materials or just talked about it rather than writing it down. I applaud Mr. Dalgaard for his courage and plain talk.

I also love how Dalgaard measures the company’s current success. I quote:

As of September 2006 we have made a dent into this goal by achieving:
Real usage by 2 million employees worldwide
Real usage by employees in 139 countries and 18 languages
Growth 3 times that of our nearest competitor
Near 100% customer referenceability
Dramatically low employee turnover
Employing no assholes

Now that is a balanced scorecard! And one that is short enough that it doesn’t suffer from the Otis Redding Problem

UPDATE ON OCTOBER 2nd: I pasted the above text in blue on Sunday October, 1 from the SuccessFactor site. So it said "Employing no assholes" just yesterday. But it seems that someone at SuccessFactors has decided that the word "asshole" is a bit too much. As Stan points out in his comment below, it now says "jerks." I bet Lars still calls them assholes, but someone with less courage has talked him into a bit of censoring. My hunch — and this is a hunch based on no other information– is this is the kind of thing that people do when they start "prettying-up" a company to sell it or go public. I could be wrong, but let’s see what happens in the next few months — or days. In any event, I still have to give them credit for straight talk for the first five years, even if they are losing a bit of courage now.

October 1, 2006

Assholes in HR

I got an interesting note from "Suzie" about how the people in HR Departments. Here is an excerpt from what she wrote me:

My
company was moving our office to another city, and the head of HR sent out
information about moving. He did not include the address or directions and also
didn’t include the email address of the person he told us to contact if we had
questions. I replied to suggest it would help all the employees to provide this
so we wouldn’t have to individually look up the information (wasting a
lot of time). A few minutes later an HR manager who reports to him came to my
cubicle to explain that I could look on Mapquest and how to use the company
phone directory. Basically I felt like I was reported for suggesting an
efficiency. I’ve pretty much found many people in HR are assholes.

Suzie’s
conclusion that she was "reported for suggested an efficiency" is
something that every person in every HR department should read and think about
closely — this is the kind of organization that quality guru W. Edwards Deming
railed against and the kind that Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson has shown undermines psychological safety, which drives out learning and error correction.

I have a lot of respect and sympathy for people who work in Human Resources departments. Unfortunately, however, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard stories like this
about people in HR. I won’t defend their behavior but it does seem to
me that many organizations put HR staff members in positions where it
is a lot easier — and safer — to act like rigid assholes instead of
actually helping people to their job. HR people have tough jobs, as they deal with some of the contentious issues in organizations, hiring, performance evaluations, pay equity, benefits, and the messy problems of dealing with problem employees of all stripes. To make matter worse, in too many companies, no one notices them when they do their jobs well, but when things go wrong, they get in trouble. So, although companies talk about people being their most important asset, people in HR are often treated as the least powerful department, and ironically, treated by other senior executives as among the company’s least important human assets.

This lack of power and constant fear of getting in trouble often leads HR executives and staff to become very bureaucratic and to say no to requests to take actions that will actually help employees do their jobs. Charles O’Reilly’s and Jeff Pfeffer’s Hidden Value shows how this mentality even arose at Southwest Airlines in the 1980’s, where the old HR Department was known as the "police department." Ann Rhoades (who went on years later to be founding head of HR at JetBlue) was brought in to turn the department around — she threw away the 300 page book of rules, renamed it the "people department," and brought in people who had line experience. Ann especially brought in people from marketing because, to paraphrase Libby Sartain who followed Ann in the position (and is now EVP of HR at Yahoo!) , people in HR always say "no" because they are so afraid of getting trouble and getting fired, while people in marketing say "yes" because they want their clients to be happy. The People Department’s job at Southwest is to do whatever it takes to make their clients — Southwest employees — happy and more effective.

I suggest that other HR managers take a cue from Suzie and Southwest. If you are in HR, do people think you are assholes who will punish them for making suggestions? If you are a senior executive, do you treat people HR so badly that it is safer for them to act like assholes rather than to actually help your people do their work?

Urban Asshole Notification Cards

Kathy Lee, one of the doctoral students I work with at Stanford, uncovered a product sold by Glakware called Urban Asshole Notification Cards. As the picture shows, these colorful cards say "Congrats! You're an Asshole" and each comes with a long checklist of different urban
offenses, ranging from double-parking, to cutting in line, to leaving
finished laundry in the washing machine or drier at the laundromat, to
not shoveling your sidewalk. The idea is that hand the card to
offenders, slide it under their doors, or leave on their windshields.
They cost $7.50 for a 10-pack. I am going to order mine right now,
although I am going to be careful who I give them to, as getting an
asshole mad can be a very dangerous thing.

Dr. Gooser and Asshole Poisoning in Hospitals

A
longitudinal study of nearly 3000 medical students from 16 medical schools was
just published the British Medical
Journal. Dr. Erica Frank and her
colleagues at the Emory Medical School found that 42 percent of seniors reported being harassed by fellow
students, professors, physicians, or patients; 84 percent reported they
had been belittled and 40 percent reported being both harassed and belittled. You can see a nice summary on Yahoo!
or can download the study at the BMJ website.

Dr.
Frank’s study is unusually careful, but the finding that hospitals are nasty
places to work – especially for nurses, medical students, and residents – has
been replicated again and again. An
earlier study of 594 “junior physicians”
(similar to “residents” in the U.S.) in the United Kingdom found that 37% had
been bullied in the prior year (especially by more senior physicians) and 84%
indicated they had witnessed bullying that was aimed at fellow junior
physicians. Nurses appear to have it especially bad, and unlike these medical
students or residents, they don’t graduate to positions as doctors where they
are relatively free from getting abuse, and apparently, also relatively free to
dish it out.

I
first saw the abuse that nurses face in the 1980s, when I was a PhD. student
at The University of Michigan. My colleague Daniel Denison and I spent a week
interviewing and observing a team of surgical nurses, and we were appalled by
how rude, oppressive, and downright abusive the male doctors were to the
(largely) female nurses. Take the
surgeon that we dubbed “Dr Gooser,” after we saw him chasing a female nurse
down the hall while trying to pinch her behind. The nurses we interviewed bitterly complained that it was useless to
report him to administrators because they would be labeled as troublemakers and
be told “he is just joking.” The told us
that all they could do was to avoid him as much as possible.

Indeed,
study after study shows that too many hospitals let people like Dr. Gooser get
away with their dirty work. A 1997 study of 130 U.S. nurses in the Journal of Professional Nursing found that 90% reported being
victims of verbal abuse by physicians during the past year; the average
respondent reported 6 to 12 incidents of abusive anger, being ignored, and
treated in a condescending fashion. Similarly,
a 2003 study of 461 nurses published in the journal of Orthopaedic Nursing found that 91% had experienced verbal abuse in
the past month, defined as mistreatment that left them feeling attacked,
devalued, or humiliated. Physicians were the most frequent source of such nastiness,
but it also came from patients and their families, fellow nurses, and
supervisors.

The author of this
most recent study, Dr. Frank, was quoted as saying, "This kind of culture
change is not going to happen with any particular rapidity." And that, "We
give a lot of lip-service to teaching professionalism [and] to reducing the
prevalence of disruptive physicians, but unless we train physicians not to do
this, it still falls into the action-speaks-louder-than-words category." Her comments raise the question of how to
start such a process of cultural change. I agree it wouldn’t be easy, but at the same time, this attitude is
dangerous because of the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that cultural change is
difficult and takes a long-time, then it will be difficult and take a long time.

Hospitals operate
under severe cost pressures, especially since the rise of HMOs. So the first thing
that comes is start with a serious
effort to calculate the total cost of assholes in hospitals (or TCA), to
calculate the amount of money lost on turnover, absenteeism, additional health
care costs and so on. I provide some
examples and a list of possible costs in The
No Asshole Rule, but one cost that I left out for hospitals is the failure to learn
from and report medical errors. There is a fascinating study by Harvard Business School’s Amy
Edmondson of eight nursing units that sheds light on the human and financial costs. She
found that when nurses worked in units with demeaning and critical co-workers
and supervisors, they were less likely (as much as 10 times less likely) to
report drug treatment errors. Edmondson’s research suggests to me that, when
asshole poisoning runs rampant in a nursing unit, the fear of being demeaned
and belittled can increase the chances that patients will get sicker and die,
because people are so afraid to admit and talk about mistakes.

Of course, there
are no magical cures for organizational problems, but they only way they get
better is by taking one step at a time, and looking for intervention points
that seem likely to get noticed. And
confronting hospital and HMO administrators with the financial costs strikes me
as a good place to start.

Brilliant But Cruel

Kent Blumberg (who
writes a very thoughtful blog on leadership, strategy and performance) wrote me
a couple emails this morning about the Fox TV show House. If you’ve seen it, you will recall it is about the grumpy
and sometimes downright abusive Dr. Gregory House, who
uses evidence-based medicine to find causes and cures where other doctors fail. Kent sent me this great snippet of dialog (from an episode called “Sex Kills”) that
demonstrates how and why we continue to let assholes get away with their
demeaning ways.

He wrote me:

“I just listened to the
dialogue again, and wrote it down a bit more accurately than I had remembered
it. The husband of a patient is talking with one of House’s team members:

Husband: “I assume that House is a
great doctor.”

Dr. Chase: “Why would you assume
that?”

Husband: “Because when you’re that
big a jerk, you’re either great or unemployed.”

I’ve written before about
how, in many organizations, if you are really big star, you are allowed to get
away with being a really big jerk. But Kent’s dialog reminds me that, if you
look at the evidence on the kind of people that we see as powerful and
intelligent, that –- independently of how smart a person actually is –- when
they act like an asshole, they are seen as smarter. This “Brilliant but Cruel” effect was demonstrated
in a study by Harvard Business School’s Teresa
Amabile. She did a controlled experiment with book reviews; some reviews
were nasty and others were nice. Amabile
found that negative and unkind reviewers were seen as less likeable but more
intelligent, competent, and expert than those who expressed the same messages
in kinder and gentler ways. She
summarized her findings by noting, “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.”

I chafe against the notion
that mean-spirited reviewers seem smarter than nice reviewers, but it also
rings true. I confess that I’ve always admired the wit displayed in the
nastiest book review I’ve ever read: Professor David P. Barash’s attack on
Professor J. Philippe Rushton’s Race,
Evolution, and Behavior,
published in Animal Behavior about 10
years ago (Volume 49, pages 1131 to 1133 if you want to look it up). Barash trots-out numerous factual criticisms,
but the review is filled with delightfully snide comments, some that border on
personal attacks. Take this gem “Rushton argues at length for what he calls the
‘principle of aggregation,’ which, in his hands, means the pious hope that that
by combining numerous turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a
valuable result; but, in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile
of shit.” Or take the very last sentence, “Bad science
and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this
despicable book.”

I don’t know about you,
but I find these sentences brilliant, but cruel!

So, if you want people to
think you are smart, apparently you can feed their stereotypes by demeaning others. In Barash’s case, the attack might
have been justified, but there are other times when people turn cruel for no
good reason, except perhaps for personal gain. I should also warn you that
although unleashing your inner asshole may help persuade people of your
intellectual superiority, we also show in The
Knowing-Doing Gap and Hard Facts that
the climate of fear created by such nastiness undermines team and
organizational effectiveness. Potential
victims become afraid to try (or even mention) new ideas and hesitate to report
mistakes or problems out of fear that the resulting anger and humiliation will
be aimed at them.

PS: The reference is: Teresa
Amabile, “Brilliant but Cruel: Perception of Negative Evaluators,” Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, 19 (1983), 146-156.

Marge’s Asshole Management Metric

Earlier this week, I was teaching a class on evidence-based management to a group of electronics executives. I talked a bit about the no asshole rule in class. This provoked a rowdy conversation during the session, which restarted with a smaller group after the class officially ended. The best story was told to us by a software executive named Bill (his real name, but I’ll omit other details), who described the asshole management technique used by Marge (also her real name), his former boss at the company. Bill described how Marge uses a four-point system (ranging from 0 to 3) to rate the degree to which a person is acting like an asshole.

Bill told and showed us how, in the middle of a meeting, Marge would sometimes point at someone, and hold up three fingers to communicate that (at least for the moment) he or she was being too nasty and needed to calm down, and how –- because Marge was so well-respected and they all understood the system — such signals had an instant and powerful effects.

Well, since we had this discussion with Bill in Thursday, I've exchanged pretty detailed e-mails with Marge and Bill, and she has given me permission to share her system with others. And as you will see, Marge has a very sophisticated system, and there are times when she believes that being more rather less of an asshole is necessary. Unfortunately, I think she is right.

In her own words, this is Marge’s scale:

0 = You are a very nice person, and very passive. No one can say a word against you, and would never think to call you an asshole.

1 = You are a normal person who can occasionally assert yourself on an issue you are passionate about, but you handle yourself in a non-confrontational way in nearly all occasions.

2 = You can consistently assert yourself in a non-confrontational way and are occasionally an asshole, but you feel horrible about it afterwards, and you may or may not apologize (but you probably will have to confess your remorse to someone).

3 = You can consistently be an asshole and you either do not recognize this or you simply enjoy it.

Bill added:

Your rating fluctuates and you can use this rating to manage people to different effect. For example, at [our company] Marge has signaled to me in meetings that I was meeting a 2.5 or a 3, which indicated to me that I should tone things down. (I was usually around a 1, for the record, which was considered acceptable) Others have been labeled a 0.5 or lower, and were told they needed to manage their average rating up closer to 1.

Marge and Bill added that she originated this system in her old company where, often, she had to signal to her people that more nastiness was required to avoid being trampled by others because it was not a nice place. In Marge’s words:

The system originated at another Silicon Valley company that had a far more confrontational and abrasive culture. Political survival demanded that people be consistently a 2.0 and sometimes a 2.5. I had a number of 0.5's on my team and we were all concerned that we were getting battered and beaten by teams that consisted of 3.0's.

I couldn’t make up stuff this good if I tried.

Four observations:

This system fascinates me because it helps me understand why the word “asshole” rather than the milder “bully” or “jerk” is so important to use: This is the word that people actually use to think about, talk about, and in Marge’s case, manage this behavior. The other words may mean nearly the same thing, but simply lack the emotional punch that goes with it.

It shows that the degree to which people are, and need to be, assholes are heavily determined by the organization they live in. If the culture is really nasty, you may need to do it to survive, and even if you don’t want to do it, I would add, it is a disease you will probably catch from your colleagues.

I wish that being an asshole was never necessary, but as I discuss in my chapter on “The Virtues of Assholes,” there are times when it is necessary for survival, and even desirable, at least in the short-term.

If you work in a place that is knee-deep in assholes, and you don’t want to turn into one or feel forced to act like one every day, the best thing you can do for yourself is to get out. Note that Marge is at a nice place now, and uses her system to help calm people down rather than to crank them-up. This lesson is consistent with what I’ve seen other places, and is one of the main points in my chapter on keeping the inner jerk that lurks in all of us from rearing its ugly head.

Finally, I want to thank Marge and Bill for telling me all about this system, letting me tell you about it, and for writing much of this blog.

How to Protect an Asshole

This story about Holland & Knight documents how the leader of a large law firm protected — and then promoted — a partner with a well-documented history of sexual abuse. When this jerk was later promoted to a senior management position, there was an outcry within the firm, and he was removed from the position. But the offender still was working at the firm last time I checked: This is the kind of thing that gives lawyers the reputation for being assholes, especially males. I will refrain from a summary: You have to read it yourself.

By the way, a few years before this incident, the firm was bragging about their "no jerk rule." I guess they were using talk as a substituite — or perhaps a smokescreen — for action.

Online Asshole Management

“The
No Asshole Rule” focuses on how traditional organizations can –- and do –- enforce
norms that stop people from acting like demeaning jerks. But, especially since
I starting blogging, people keep telling me about how similar rules are
expressed and enforced in online communities.

A
few months back, my teenage son showed me an intriguing chatlog from (I hope I
am getting this language right) a chat channel that he is part of where people
talk about massively multiplayer online
games (MMOGs). The log starts with an
incident where a person is banned for soliciting people to sell him drugs. Then a conversation among about 10 people starts
about some of the worst “asshats” and “assholes” they’ve ever encountered and
how quickly they had been kicked-off, including “the one who started the
argument about using gay as an insult.” The group then decides to establish “a
three strikes rule,” where “We’re going to start using temporary silencing as
warning shots for people causing an abundance of trouble,” and after three
incidents, ban them permanently.

I started asking my friends who play online games if
they have such a rule, and I learned that, for example, that in World of
Warcraft, some “guilds” write down and enforce quite detailed rules, which
often include guidelines for expelling people who act like jerks. A gamer who
read this blog also sent me to several links on Penny Arcade
(a site for gamers) that talk about “The Golden
Rule of Internet: Don’t be a Dick,” which list things that can get you banned from MMOGs and chat groups. I
don’t understand all these guidelines, as many have to do with game play, but I
do understand why they ban pornographic images, racism, and my favorite item because
it is so subtle and so compelling:

Trolling
This has a working definition of "attempting to be as
annoying as possible while still technically obeying the rules," and it’s
not the way to go about getting attention. There tends to be a thin line
between being annoying and being funny. Those who cross it–whether through a
lack of familiarity with the forums or as sad, twisted, bid for attention–will
be banned.

Another person wrote me about how people in the
Wikipedia community, specifically on Wikimedia, also talk about
and apply the “Don’t
be a dick” rule. Apparently, the guideline is:

Don’t be a dick. If people abided by
this, we wouldn’t need any other policies. This is a corollary of ignore all
rules, and most other rules are a special case of this one.

And I like the added advice:

If you’ve been labeled as a dick, or if you suspect that you may be
one, the first step is to realize it. Ask what is causing this perception.
Change your behavior and your mode of presentation. If needed, apologize to
anyone to whom you may have been a dick. It’s okay! People will take notice of
your willingness to cooperate and will almost always meet your efforts with
increased respect.

This
last bit of advice mirrors my observations from the off-line world: That the
first step to recovering from being an asshole is to realize that you are
one. And when people realize that you
are taking authentic steps to reform, they often show remarkable understanding.
In fact, some you may have seen those buttons and refrigerator magnets that say
"Admitting
you are an asshole is the first step."

As
an organizational researcher, I am fascinated by how explicitly these norms are
stated and how – although there are arguments and ambiguities – about what it
means to be a online jerk, there is a remarkable amount of consensus as well.

PS:
I am just starting to learn about how online groups engage in “asshole
management” and enforce other important norms, so of any of you could point me
to other places where I might learn more, I would appreciate it.

The No Arsehole Rule Down Under

I just got a lovely note from Shawn Callahan, who is the founding director of an Australian firm called Anecdote, which works with companies on learning and organizational change problems. I was delighted to hear Shawn’s report: ‘Just thought you might like to know that we have been pushing the "No asshole
(arsehole in Australia) rule" on our blog for a few months as part of a campaign
to reintroduce humanity into the workplace.’ I would be curious to hear other news about strategies that are being used to reform and expell demeaning jerks from workplaces down under.

I especially liked the list that Shawn alerted me to from Pam Slim’s blog "Escape from Cubicle Nation," an open letter to senior executives that contains ten tips for treating employees with dignity and respect, My two favorites are:

Spend a moment walking around the halls of your company and look at your employees.
I mean really look at them. Don’t just pat them on the back and pump
their hand while looking over their head at the exit door. Look
directly in their eyes. Imagine what their life is like. Who is
waiting at home for them? What are the real consequences to their
health, marriages and children when they have to work yet another 13
hour day?

Don’t ask for your employees’ input if you are not going to listen to it.
I have facilitated offsite meetings that lasted for days where
well-intentioned managers brainstormed and argued and edited and wrote
flip charts until their hands turned blue. They sweated over creating
something that was relevant and for a brief period of time actually
were proud of what they accomplished. Until a month later when I heard
that you scrapped the whole thing in favor of a plan cooked up by an
outside consulting firm. This does not only completely waste smart
people’s time, it guarantees that you will have hostility and
resentment the next time you ask for creative input.

Great stuff! And I look forward to following Anecdote’s progress down under, and Pam’s blog is pretty cool.