Work Matters

  • On Saving the American Health System: Dr. Donald Berwick’s Farewell Speech

    Don Berwick is an American hero and also a victim of the obscene stalemate in Washington; the one being heaped on us by our Congress that has a 9% approval rating.  Most people that I know with a score that low would have the self-respect to quit rather than to point fingers at others.  Well, as part of this mess, Congress wouldn't approve the appointment of Dr. Don Berwick, who is a true American hero because he is among one of the real leaders of the movement to save American health care.  Before coming to Washington, the organization he led, a small non-profit called the Institute for Health Improvement, organized and guided an effort in American hospitals that — by doing simple, evidence things like hand washing, raising the bed when people are on a respirator, and other small but effective things — saved more than 100,000 lives by some estimates.  This little non-profit recruited over 3000 hospitals that had over 70% of the beds in the U.S. to participate in this effort to reduce preventable deaths.

    Obama, recognizing his greatness, appointed him as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Or he tried to. Our do nothing — or actually do nothing but screw the other side — Congress opposed his appointment, so Obama did one of those sneaky interim appointments that Berwick to keep the position for 17 months before being forced out.  The New York Times Joe Nocera did a great piece on him, check it out. 

    The thing I would especially emphasize is that Berwick is not and has never been about ideology, he is about effectiveness and cost-cutting is central to everything he does and advocates.  Perhaps he wasn't mean and tough and selfish enough for our broken system; it is a shame that a guy who does everything possible to put patients first would be fired by people who do everything they can to put themselves first.

     I urge you to read his amazing farewell address. Get it here: Download Ihi forum don berwick 12-15.dat.Consider a few key parts. Here are his five principles — and unlike people in Congress who TALK about doing things — Berwick's organization has already led efforts to DO such things and continues to do so every day. He gets fired and they keep their jobs?  I quote:

    This is our task… our unwelcome task – if we are to help save health care from the cliff. To reduce costs, by reducing waste, at scale, everywhere, now.

    I recommend five principles to guide that investment:

    1. Put the patient first. Every single deed – every single change – should protect, preserve, and enhance the well being
    of the people who need us. That way – and only that way – we will know waste when we see it.

    2. Among patients, put the poor and disadvantaged first –those in the beginning, the end, and the shadows of life. Let us meet the moral test.

    3. Start at scale. There is no more time left for timidity. Pilots will not suffice. The time has come, to use Göran Henrik’s
    scary phase, to do everything. In basketball, they call it “flooding the zone.” It’s time to flood the Triple Aim zone.

    4. Return the money. This is the hardest principle of them all. Success will not be in our hands unless and until the parties
    burdened by health care costs feel that burden to be lighter. It is crucial that the employers and wage-earners and unions and states and taxpayers – those who actually pay the health care bill – see that bill fall.

    5. Act locally. The moment has arrived for every state,community, organization, and profession to act. We need mobilization – nothing less.

    To show these aren't just theories or pipe dreams, look at these examples from Dr. Berwick's speech:

    It is not possible to claim that we do not know what to do. We have the templates.

    If you doubt it, visit the brilliant Nuka care system at Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage, which just won the Baldrige Award. I visited in October. Thoroughly integrated teams of caregivers –physicians, advanced practice nurses, behavioral health specialists, nutritionists, and more – occupying open physical pods in line-of-sight contact with each other all day long, weaving a net of help and partnership with Alaska Native patients and families. The results: 60% fewer Emergency and Urgent CareVisits, 50% fewer hospitalizations, and 40% less use of specialists, along with staff turnover 1/5th as frequent as before the new care.

    If you doubt that we know what to do, visit Denver Health or ThedaCare or Virginia Mason, and see the Toyota principles of lean production learned, mastered, adapted, and deployed through entire systems and into the skills and psyches of entire workforces. The result, over $100 million in savings at Denver Health while vastly improving the experience and outcomes of patients.

    If you doubt that we know what to do, contact George Halvorson at Kaiser Permanente and ask him how they have reduced sepsismortality – sepsis is the cause of death in 24% of seniors who die in California hospitals. Kaiser-Permanente has driven down sepsis mortality by nearly half – to 11% in less than three years.

    Then, Berwick said to the colleagues he was leaving at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

    Let me put it simply: in this room, with the successes already in hand among you here, you collectively have enough knowledge to rescue American health care – hands down. Better care, better health, and lower cost through improvement right here. In this room.

    The only question left is: Will you do it?

    Shame on us as a country for allowing this man to be fired and for bickering and backstabbing while the solutions appear to be at hand.  Can't we join together to do the right things?

  • What Are Good Things About Having A Lousy Boss?

    I have a weird question for Work Matters readers, one I've been fretting over for a couple weeks. 

    What are some GOOD things about working for a BAD boss?

    I would love to hear your thoughts on this odd question.  Here is the story of how it came about.

    About two weeks back, I enjoyed a long dinner with a couple good friends of mine — whose names must be kept anonymous given the facts that follow.  I generally like to name names, but in this case, I will not out them and will also omit identifying information (and change a couple key descriptions) to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

    To get back to our dinner, we were among the first people at the place and the last to leave because we were having so much fun talking many different topics — why incremental innovation is sometimes under appreciated (well, not in China… and look how they are doing) and why breakthrough innovations are overqualified, how the best way to influence your spouse is through your kids rather than directly, and why the 130 proof bourbon that the bartender gave us to try was a cool idea — especially because the ice cubes sink in it — but too much like drinking lighter fluid for our tastes. 

    But this blog post is about the topic we kept coming back to, the idea that, well, bad bosses aren't all bad.  Of course, we all had suffered through bad bosses, and had seen them do all kinds of damage.  BUT — and this the thread I thought I would raise here — during the course of the conversation, we all started realizing that a bad boss — especially the kind who doesn't really have the power to hurt you very much — can be a great thing in some ways.  The notion that you can learn a lot about what NOT to do from a bad boss has been around for decades . A charming version of this argument is in Robert Towsend's classic Up The Organization, where he asserts that much of what he learned about being a good boss came from working for such awful bosses at American Express early in his career.

    The focus of our conversation about bad bosses, however, turned a different direction that I am still fretting over.  One of my friends had just ended a long stint working for a lousy boss, one who could be a selfish asshole at times and was a legendary backstabber and narcissist.  He talked about how great it was that this selfish jerk had been removed from his management job and was now working a line job again, and how his new boss was thus far amazing — selfless, open, always thinking about was good for his group rather than himself, listening all the time, practicing constant empathy. This guy could be the poster child for Good Boss, Bad Boss.

    Then, my other friend chimed in and talked about how he wished he had such a boss because his current boss was so lame.  She was inept in many ways, especially committing sins of omission: not going to meetings she should, not answering emails no matter how important, not following through on commitments, not jumping into help his team when she said she would, not having the guts to deal with performance problems, not reaching outside of the organization to develop a stronger network, and perhaps worst of all, constantly spending time planning and talking and brainstorming — but pretty much being unable or unwilling to actually get anything done.  This boss could be the poster child for The Knowing-Doing Gap.

    Then, however, the conversation took an interesting turn that still gnaws at my mind. The guy with the good boss said to the one with the bad boss "Be careful what you wish for, I got the great boss I want, and it has disadvantages."

    He went on to explain that, when he had that inept boss, he felt obligated to take only minimal steps to help his organization.  He did everything he could to avoid contact with his boss — and would never lift a finger to help that asshole succeed.  He wasn't the only one in his group who reacted that way: Alienation was high and the commitment was low throughout.  But he didn't just mess around at work. He devoted his energy to developing a big book of business and for developing a great reputation among clients.  In other words, and this is the key point, he was treated sufficiently badly by his boss (as were others), that he felt free to act largely in his self-interest.

    BUT with this new and nearly model boss, he and many of his colleagues are spending much more time working to help the organization in all sorts of ways — to recruit new people, to repair broken procedures, to attend every group meeting, to develop business that helps the organization and not necessarily themselves.  As a result, he is spending far less time doing things that benefited only him, and as a result, not only is making a bit less money, he is having less fun too. He now feels compelled to do things that he doesn't like to benefit his group and organization — because he respects and admires his boss so much, and didn't want to let him down.

    Then, we started quizzing my friend who still had the bad boss.  Our friend has become a total star in recent years.  The work his team does is bringing in a third of the group's revenue, he has freedom to do what he wants, his boss is rather afraid of him so almost never tells what to do, he is making a lot of money, and — while he is still doing many things to help his group succeed — he is far more respected both inside and outside the organization than his boss.  As my friend with the new good boss warned him, if you got your dream boss — or worse yet they gave you your bosses job — you might feel great in some ways.  But your life would change for the worse in other ways.  You would start doing more things that benefited your organization that were not in your pure self-interest, you would spend more time doing things to help others that you would rather not do, you would go to more meetings with people who are of no interest to you –and even dislike — because doing so was for the greater good.

    The conversation went back and forth in this vein for awhile, and although all three of us still believe that bad bosses suck on the whole, we started wondering if a more general, elaborate, and evidence-absed argument might be made about the upsides of working for a loser.  In this post, there are some hints:

    1. You can learn what NOT to do.

    2. If you just have ordinary competence, you look like a genius compared to your boss.

    3.  You don't feel compelled to waste time doing extra things that help your group and organization.  After all,  if they aren't doing much for you or are treating you badly (via your boss), why should you do anything to help them?

    3. Your boss is so inept at implementation that it isn't worthwhile going to meetings, generating ideas, or suggesting now paths the organization might take. None of it will happen in anyway, so why waste your time?

    4.  A lousy boss probably needs you more than a good boss — and thus you may have power — because you keep bailing him or her out, bringing in money or clients that he or she is too inept to do, and performing other competent acts that protect the boss and make the boss look better than he or she really deserves.

    5. If the boss leaves (perhaps is fired — but in too many organizations lousy bosses get promoted), and you get the job, people will think you are brilliant because of the power of psychological contrast. (I am cheating here, as this is really about an advantage of taking a position last held by a horrible boss).

    I am partly having fun here and partly serious.  Yet as we talked about the good and bad bosses my friends had, and other bosses we had known and worked for, we realized that there are some perhaps under appreciated advantages to having a bad boss.  I am not sure how far to take this, but for now, perhaps we could have some fun. Let's try a little thought exercise and look at the same thing as everyone else, but to try to see it differently.

    So, once more, I want to hear from you:

    What do you think? What are some other advantages of working for lousy boss?

  • Creative People Must Be Stopped! Dave Owens’ Great New Book Published Today

    Book-image-suit_red

    Dave Owens was one of my doctoral students about 15 years ago. He always amazed me with has range of talents.  He was not only remarkably well-read and a great field researcher, he could build or fix anything.  There was an interesting moment when he was doing an ethnography at a now defunct design firm.  Dave met with me to complain that he kept going to one meeting after another where the development team brainstormed and argued and argued and talked and talked about what the prototype should be.   It was driving Dave crazy because he had worked at IDEO as a designer for several years and has a masters in product design from Stanford — so he couldn't stand seeing talking as a substitute for prototyping.   He told me had had the parts in his garage and could build a prototype in a day, two at most, and asked if he should.  I discouraged him from doing so because it would compromise his objectivity and neutrality as an ethnographer.   As I have looked back at that advice over the years, I still wonder if I was wrong.  Indeed, the product development team was shut down when pretty much the same product they had been talking about hit the market. If Dave had built that prototype, they might have had a shot at getting to market.  I also have wondered since then if there really is such at thing as an objective or neutral ethnographer. 

    In any event, Dave has taken those skills and gone on to quite career. He has been teaching creativity and innovation at Vanderbilt for years and students love him.  He has worked with many organizations — from Dell to NASA to LEGO — as consultant and even took a break from Vanderbilt to serve as CEO of Griffin Technology.  Dave has wrapped all that practical and academic knowledge into a great new book , Creative People Must Be Stopped. I love the cover.  Dave has put together an information-rich  website for the book.  Dave does a great job of showing various impediments to innovation and then offering tactics and strategies for overcoming them in the book– he has an "Innovation Constraints Survey" you might check-out.  The whole book is fun and useful, but perhaps my favorite chapter is "If it is such a great idea, why isn't our competitor doing it?"  I can't tell how many times I have heard that creativity killer inside of large companies where people are punished for pressing original ideas.

    Let me know what you think of the survey and the book.  I read it in galley form and loved it, and i just ordered a copy from Amazon — I think Dave is sending me one because I did a blurb but I like to support my former students!

     

  • Strategy & Business Lists Hard Facts Among Decade’s 10 Most Significant Books

    Strategy and Business just released a list of the 10 "most significant books" published between 2001 and 2010.  They looked back and selected one book for each year.   I am pleased to announce that, for 2006, they picked the book that Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote about evidence-management.  Here is what they said:

    2006
    Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton (Harvard Business School Press). By explaining the causes of common managerial errors (casual benchmarking, repeating what worked in the past, and following unexamined ideologies), Pfeffer and Sutton pointed the way to better decision making.

    Jeff and I are delighted the selection; we believe that, although some organizations are making progress toward using evidence rather than making bad gut decisions, doing what they have always done, or mindlessly imitating seemingly successful organizations, that our workplaces would be far more effective if decision-makers made a commitment to using evidence-based practices when possible, especially when making important decisions (unfortunately, they seem to do the opposite too often).  

    If you want to listen to a fun interview about the power of evidence-based management, check out the recent Planet Money interview with Harrah's CEO Gary Lovemen, who we talk about a lot in Hard Facts. It starts out with a quote/joke from Gary that also appears in our book, something like "There are three ways to get fired at Harrah's: Stealing, sexual harassment, and not having a control group."  Although he is joking a bit, taking an evidence-based approach has given Harrah's a huge competitive advantage.

    Here is the rest of the list.  You can read about each in more detail here in the original story.

    2001
    Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins 

    2002
    Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

    2003
    Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround, by Louis V. Gerstner Jr

    2004
     Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds, by Howard Gardner

    2005
    The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, by C.K. Prahalad

    2007
    Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas K. McCraw

    2008
    Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter, by Pankaj Ghemawat

    2009
    Managing, by Henry Mintzberg (Berrett-Koehler). The iconoclastic Canadian professor made the best case of his career for a more holistic, humane view of managing, which he convincingly declares is as much art as science. 2010

    2010
    Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, by Boris Groysberg

    We are honored to be included in such a great group.  Of this list, my favorite three are probably "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance," "Prophet of Innovation," and "Chasing Stars." My candidates for the best books of 2011 are The Progress Principle and, because of impact, Steve Jobs of course.

  • The Croatian No Asshole Cover: One of the Most Funny

    NAR in Croatian

    One of the most fun things about The No Asshole Rule is seeing all the different ways that designers have fun with the cover.  There are some wonderful variations. 

    I love the Italian cover, with its shocking red.  The Polish one is charmingly weird (especially the picture of the guy hanging himself from his tie). The Slovenian cover, with the pig is one of my favorites for its silly simplicity. The Russian cover is strange with the stop sign — several native speakers have told me the title is rather obscene.  The Portuguese cover is a bit dull.  I think the Japanese cover is the most beautiful. I have a hard copy of the Chinese translation, which has all these cute panda bears, but can't find a picture. And then there is another one that is Chinese too that has picture of a fly swatter smacking little people around (sorry the picture on the web is pretty small). I can't find a picture of the Korean cover on the web, but they say it has sold well and I still get inquires from Korean journalists about it.

      I also can't complain about the original design and how several countries including Denmark, Germany, Holland, France just used the original delete button.  The French version published in Quebec is different and the way they translated is pretty funny, something like "Zero dirty dogs,"  which similar to the Korean take on it, which I think is "Zero Asshole Rule." 

    I was reminded of all this last week when I got a few copies of the latest translation — in Croatian.  The cover just cracked me up, and everyone else in the family. That exploding head is pretty weird. I probably missed a few countries in my list here, but is was entertaining to go back and look at all the crazy versions.

  • Wisdom from Stanford’s Jim March on the Numbing Effect of Business Schools

    There is a great interview on leadership with Jim March (probably the most prestigious living organizational theorist) by Joel Podolny (current head of HR at Apple, but also a very accomplished academic researcher) in the current edition of the Academy of Management Learning and Eduction journal (Vol. 10, No. 3, 502–506.)  The link is here, but someone will likely make you buy it. 

    March, as always, looks at things differently than the rest of us.  For example, he does a lovely job of arguing — using historical figures like Aristotle and Alexander the Great — that the time frames used in most leadership research are often too short to be useful.  But what really caught my eye was a line that reminded me of that old Pink Floyd song :

            We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.

    March laments on page 503 :

    My experience with business school students is that those who possess an instinct for joy, passion, and beauty often learn to suppress their expression by virtue of a sense that such instincts are unwelcome both in business schools and in business, thereby making the sense self-confirming.

    I found this depressingly accurate for too many students, who often seem to lose their spark.  It doesn't just happen in business schools, to be clear, it is a danger in any school or institution that has strong norms, where people are in close physical proximity, and they have a lot of contact with each other (Indeed, Apple especially needs to guard against this now).  I do believe that the d.school — at least at its best — sometimes serves as a countervailing force, as the best teachers and classes there do encourage joy and self-expression.  But as much as I love being a professor, I do think that Jim raises an implicit question that every educator needs to keep asking him or herself:

    "What am I teaching my students? Am I teaching them to think for themselves and to be themselves? Or am I teaching them to a perfect imitation of each other, or of some other idealized and emotionally cold model of humanity?" 

    I am not saying that conformity is all bad, but too often we teach it unwittingly. I am curious about your reactions to March's point.  Is he (and I guess me) too hard on the educational process?  What can be done to educate people without turning them into emotionally repressed and joyless clones?

    P.S. BY the way, after I posted it, I realized that March's comment actually is another example of the issue I raised in my last post about how roles can change what do and believe so much.

  • The Power Of The Roles We Take: A Very Old Study And Related Thoughts

    I recently had a rather painful meeting with a group of friends that I all admire.  I need to keep things vague to protect both the guilty and the innocent. But I was amazed — perhaps flabbergasted is a better word — to see how my friends who had taken and devoted enormous energy to their leadership roles couldn't help but defend their every move.  They denied problems that seemed obvious and when they could bring themselves to actually acknowledge a glaring problem,  they minimized its impact and quickly turned conversation to how minor this problem was compared to all the other truly wonderful things they were doing.  

    Then it hit me.  Well, of course, I know why this is happening.  As numerous psychology studies show,  people generally have self-serving biases, are motivated to present positive and flattering self-images (to themselves and others), and the roles we play in life are so powerful that they can quickly overwhelm our ability to process information objectively and can reverse any previously critical or negative views we once had about those roles. 

    The lesson, of course, is that we all need to be very careful about the roles we take in life — the organizations we join and lead, the kinds of people we hang out with, and the like — because even if don't like the people and the values they represent, and perhaps just take a job because we need or want that job — odds are that we will become more (or much) like the people we are around and the values associated with the positions we hold. 

     In particular, I was reminded of a very old study called "The Effects of Changes in Roles on the Attitudes of Role Occupants," which was published by Seymour Lieberman in Human Relations in 1956. The study was fascinating in that Lieberman was able to gather data during a "naturally occurring experiment" where people who worked in a manufacturing company switched roles — in some cases moving from a worker to foreman and in other cases, moving from a worker to a union steward.   The numbers were not large, only some 58 people changed roles.  But the magnitude of the effects were quite large, especially among the new foremen. They changed their attitudes markedly, turning pro-management, pro-company, and anti-union within 6 months of taking their new jobs.  For example, 70% of the new foremen reported seeing the company as a better place to work than the did when they were workers, while only 26% had no change in opinion. 74% believed that the union should have less say in setting standards than they did when they were workers.  And on and on. The new union stewards also expressed stronger pro-worker and pro-union sentiments than when they had been workers, but the effects were not as pronounced. 

    Then, there was an interesting twist that Seymour Lieberman took advantage of; as a result of a downturn, about a third (8) of the 23 workers  who had been promoted to foremen were then demoted to workers, while the other two-thirds remained foremen.  The numbers here are very small, and while modern studies have replicated related findings with more rigor, it is still interesting to see that the 8 workers who returned to being workers soon developed pretty much the same anti-management and pro-union sentiments as their fellow workers; but those who remained as foreman retained their pro-company and pro-management attitudes.

    I am writing about Lieberman's old study partly for sentimental reasons, as it was done at The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, where I hung out and sometimes worked as a doctoral student.  It was was one of the first research papers I ever read about the power of roles and how they can erase and reverse opinions and attitudes that we believe are core parts of who we are and aspire to be.  

    My old warm memories aside, there have since been many other studies on the power of situations to overwhelm our personalities and attitudes (indeed, you could argue that the power of situations over personalities is an assumption that drives many if not most experiments done by psychologists). Again, the lesson is that we all need to be very careful of the roles we take and realize that they will probably change us more than we change them — I am not trying to be fatalistic, but this is an evidence-based statement.  Sometimes this is a good thing, especially when we join a group composed of noble and skilled human-beings.  But every manager and leader out there ought to be aware that no matter how self-critical and self-aware you might be, the very act of taking leadership role will likely make you defend and support your organization more vehemently than the facts likely justify.   At moderate levels of reality distortion, this probably isn't a bad thing as it instills confidence in yourself and others.  But the damage can be severe when you and your company are screwing-up royally, and you can't see the flaws or any good reason to make repairs.

  • Bad is Stronger than Good: Why Eliminating the Negative is More Important than Accentuating the Positive

    I  had a piece appear today in the Wall Street Journal called "How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything," a topic I have written on before and her, especially, in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A fun discussion of bad apples can also be found on This American Life; check out the opening interview of this episode with Will Felps, who has done some cool research on how bad apples have a disproportionately negative effect on group performance. 

    The underlying theory and evidence for my argument that bad apples do so much damage, and more broadly destructive emotions and incompetence undermine performance and well-being so much, that the first order of business for any boss is to eliminate the negative rather than accentuate the positive (I am not discouraging goodness and excellence… but getting rid of the bad is importance for achieving greatness).  This perspective is inspired by a masterpiece of an academic article called "Bad is Stronger Than Good," which was published in 2001 by Roy F. Baumeister and three other colleagues. If you want to really dig in, I invite you to download Bad is Stronger Than Good.. it is very detailed but readable.

    Essentially, the authors meticulously go through topic after topic — personal relationships, learning, memory, self-image, and numerous others — and show that bad packs a much stronger impact than good. They review a couple hundred diverse studies to make this point, and as they say at the end, the consistency of their findings about the disproportionate impact of bad things (compared to the power of good things)– like negative emotions, hostility, abuse, dysfunctional acts, destructive relationships, serious injuries and accidents, incompetence, and on and on — is depressingly consistent across study after after study. 

    One implication for managers and numerous other influencers in organizations is that, while bringing and breeding great people, and encouraging civility, competence, effort, and other kinds of goodness is an important part of the job, such efforts will be undermined if you aren't constantly vigilant about eliminating the negative, which includes dealing with people who are bad apples.  Baumeister and his colleagues also do suggest that another implication is sheer volume — overwhelming strong bad stuff with lots of weak good stuff.  I will discuss that approach at the end of this post.

    By coincidence, my doctoral course on leadership is reading and discussing this article today, so I re-read it closely this weekend, and it just knocks my socks off.  Here are just a few quotes from the article that got my attention:

    This one explains why bad could be so much stronger — we are selected to focus on it:

    From our perspective, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased probability of passing along their genes. (p. 325)

    On bad versus events:

    A diary study by David, Green, Martin, and Suls (1997) examined the effects of everyday good and bad events, as well as personality traits. Undesirable (bad) events had more pervasive effects on subsequent mood than desirable (good) ones. Although each type of event influenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad events influenced bad mood, and good events predicted good mood) to similar degrees, bad events had an additional effect on the opposite-valence mood that was lacking for good events. In other words, bad events influenced both good and bad moods, whereas good events influenced only good moods. (p. 327)

    How long the impact of everyday events lasts was studied by Sheldon, Ryan, and Reis (1996). Bad events had longer lasting effects. In their data, having a good day did not have any noticeable effect on a person's well-being the following day, whereas having a bad day did carry over and influence the next day. (p.327)

    On close relationships.  Note the implication is that if you do something bad in a close relationship, you've got to do at least five good things (on average) to make up for it:

    On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994) has proposed a revealing diagnostic index for evaluating relationships: He proposed that in order for a relationship to succeed, positive and good interactions must outnumber the negative and bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratio falls below that, the relationship is likely to fail and breakup. This index converges well with the thrust of our argument: Bad events are so much stronger than good ones that the good must outnumber the bad in order to prevail. Gottman's index suggests that bad events are on average five times as powerful as good ones, at least with regard to close relationships. (p. 329)

    The article goes on and on in this vein, digging into seemingly every possible nuance, and constantly concluding that "bad is stronger than good.:  Here are a some excerpts from the wrap-up toward the end:

    Let us briefly summarize the evidence. In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events. Close relationships are more deeply and conclusively affected by destructive actions than by constructive ones, by negative communications than positive ones, and by conflict than harmony. Additionally, these effects extend to marital satisfaction and even to the relationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce). Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger and have bigger effects than friendly,harmonious ones. Bad moods and negative emotions have stronger effects than good ones on cognitive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good moods). That suggests that people's desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their desire to get into a good one. (p. 362)

    Bad parenting can be stronger than genetic influences; good parenting is not. Research on social support has repeatedly found that negative, conflictual behaviors in one's social network have stronger effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad things receive more attention and more thorough cognitive processing than good things. When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact on the total impression than any comparable good information. (p.362)

    Bad stereotypes and reputations are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger effects than good feedback. Bad health has a greater impact on happiness than good health, and health itself is more affected by pessimism (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) than optimism (the presence or absence of a positive outlook). (p.362)

    Their closing paragraph, implies — albeit weakly– to one solution to overcoming the power of bad.

    Although it may seem pessimistic to conclude that bad is stronger than good, we do not think that such pessimism is warranted. As we have suggested, there are several reasons to think that it may be highly adaptive for human beings to respond more strongly to bad than good. In the final analysis, then, the greater power of bad may itself be a good thing. Moreover, good can still triumph in the end by force of numbers. Even though a bad event may have a stronger impact than a comparable good event, many lives can be happy by virtue of having far more good than bad events.

    I think this implied solution of working extra hard to crank up the good to drown out the bad is certainly part of the answer.  But, to me, another and probably more effective solution for managers is to work doggedly to screen out and stop bad people and bad behavior at every stage.  This means dealing with it via big things like recruiting, selection, training, rewards and punishments, and removing people; and, just as important, paying attention to the little things like  giving people feedback when they are destructive.   Another implication I emphasize is that self-awareness is important so that we realize when we are being bad and damaging others — and damn well better work on changing our attitudes and actions.

    I know this is a long and detailed post.  My view is that you can read the lighter and more bouncy piece in the Wall Street Journal, so I thought I would use this post to geek out a bit and dig into the underlying research. 

  • Hostile and Entertaining Amazon Review for The No Asshole Rule

    0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
    1.0 out of 5 stars Typical attention seeking baby boomer, October 15, 2011

    Yet another selfish baby boomer sinks basic civility to get our attention. I think we have heard enough from the generation that thinks behaving like a petulant adolescent is a virtue. If he can't take the time to address us like adults, or articulate exactly what he means by 'a**hole' what's the sense in taking advice from him?
    ..and now that he has grabbed our attention, what do we get? fluff. Another article padded into a book, which plenty of examples of unpleasant people at work but little substance how to deal with them, or the unpleasant fact that it's often effective form of management- think of the marines for example and toughening up of mama's boys.

    Of course with the baby boom generation it's all about me me me and my feelings. Spare me.

    The above review just appeared on Amazon.  Sorry, the screen shot didn't work (at least for me)  but so I had to do cut and paste, you can see the original here.

    When I first started writing books, I would take every negative Amazon review personally.  And I confess that when they are careful, thoughtful, and negative, they still sting.  But I have learned to enjoy, even relish, the outrageous ones.  This one certainly qualifies.  I plead guilty to being a baby boomer and to selecting — really insisting on — The No Asshole Rule title.   My favorite line in the review is "toughening up the mama's boys."   Great stuff.

    P.S. It is a good time to buy this book for mama's boys.  Apparently, Amazon bought a bunch from the now-defunct Border's and you can get the No Asshole Rule paperback there for six bucks.  These bargain books produce a much lower royalty rate to authors, but are a great deal for readers.  I don't know how many they have; there was a bargain version of Good Boss, Bad Boss last week, but it sold out.  

  • Is It Sometimes Rational to Select Leaders Randomly? A Cool Old Study

    This term at Stanford, I am teaching a doctoral seminar on leadership.  Of course, this one of the broadest and most confusing topics on earth.  I am not qualified to teach a seminar on love or religion; so, for me, this is the most vexing topic I can teach.  The topic for the first meeting was "cynicism."  I started out by assigning academic papers that brought evidence and perspectives that undermined conventional assumptions about leadership and that even questioned why scholars bothered to study the topic at all (my friend and co-author Jeff Pfeffer raised this question in a 1977 paper called "The Ambiguity of Leadership").

    The most entertaining paper we read was by S. Alexander Haslam and a long list of coauthors, called  "Inspecting the emperor's clothes: evidence that random selection of leaders can enhance group performance" (Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1998, pp. 168-184).  The two key studies in the paper entailed assigning student groups to play various versions of the "survival exercise" (see some of the variations here), where the group imagines that they have experienced some kind of disaster and are stranded (a plane crash, a broken car in the desert, and a nuclear war were used in these studies).  The group's task is to rank order the importance of a dozen or so items that might help them survive the ordeal (e.g., a compass, map,  loaded pistol, newspapers, cigarette lighter).  The performance of the group is determined by comparing their rank-ordering to those produced by experts.  This is, of course, just a simulation of reality.  But I've participated and led these exercises and they are quite engaging — I suspect many of you have had similar experiences. 

    Overall, the researchers compared the performance of these student groups under four conditions:

    1.  A leader selected via a formal selection process (self-ratings by group members)

    2. A leader selected by an informal process (group members had a discussion and picked a leader)

    3. A leader who was randomly selected.

    4. No leader selected. 

    The consistent finding was that groups with RANDOMLY selected members performed significantly better than groups in all other conditions, and there weren't significant differences found between the other conditions.  The researchers also did some follow-up surveys, and revealed some mildly interesting findings; notably, groups with randomly selected leaders rated their leaders as LESS effective even though their performance was BETTER.

    The authors assert that this rather surprising finding — which was fairly strong and replicated across two (albeit modest) studies — occurs because performance on this task requires cooperation, input, and effort from all group members.  They suggest that the very act of selecting one individual, of singling him or her out as better than the rest or simply focusing attention on that person, undermines the group's sense of unity and shared identity. They suggest that doing so may lead to social loafing.   As they put it, in describing the impact of a contest for the "best" leader:

      'In effect, their thoughts about the leader may have been of the form "if you're so wonderful, you can get on with it.' 

    I am still not entirely sure that these arguments are right, but I guess they make some sense (although they do not quite explain why groups that did not select leaders at all did equally badly — the researchers suggest this is because the leadership role is necessary).  Yet the study, imperfections aside, is provocative.  I like it because it challenges so many deeply held assumptions about groups and organizational life.  I especially like how it implies that just THE PROCESS of selecting the leader can provoke group dynamics that undermine the performance of the group as a whole.  That is worth considerable attention as this is something that selection committees and such often forget — and consistent with findings from many corners of the behavioral sciences that show "what you do is as important as how you do it."  Also, while the survival games probably do not generalize well to most tasks in organizational life, another possible implication is that, if you are doing a task where no one has any special expertise or experience, you might try randomly selecting your leader.

    What do you think? Does this have any implication in real life, or is it just one of those crazy studies that is irrelevant to real people and organizations?

    P.S. As veteran readers of this blog may remember, I have written about the virtues of randomness before; check out this post about Karl Weick's cool ideas about randomness and wisdom.

    P.P.S. Do not miss the link to the study from Arie below.  More evidence that randomly promoting people might work! Thanks Arie, fantastically weird.