Work Matters

  • Jeff Pfeffer Comments on Time is Money

    Jeff Pfeffer added an interesting comment the post I did on The Billable Hour Turns People Into Workaholics that I think is most interesting. I repeat:

    DeVoe and I started this research to understand how organizational practices "spill over" into other domains.  We have found, using nationally representative survey data, that people paid by the hour (and these are not all, or even most, technical contractors, lawyers, etc., but instead are manufacturing and service workers), are, controlling for many other things, more willing to trade more time for more money and less likely to spend time volunteering.  The research we have done cites an article by Steve Barley (a colleague of Bob’s) and two co-authors who found a paradox:  people who went into contracting to presumably increase their freedom actually acted like they didn’t have any.  This sort of paradox–acting in ways that are inconsistent with our preferences–is something that we continue to pursue in this research project.

    So, two points–this is not just about professional or technical contractors or lawyers or accountants–the evidence is that the phenomenon is widespread.  And second, there are other ways to get the same results–namely, priming people (using a sentence descramble task) to think about money or economics terms, or to have people calculate their own hourly wage (regardless of how they are paid).  There is evidence that having people think about money causes them to act in a more independent (not wanting to ask for or give help, not wanting to associate with others) way. 

    In light of the pervasive use of economic language in our society, and in light of the prominence of "money," it does sort of make one wonder.  The article on money is in Science and Vohs is one of the co-authors–it is both short and interesting.

    P.S.Here is the link to the abstract of the Science article on The Psychological Consequences of Money that Jeff mentions.

  • The Billable Hour Turns People into Workaholics

    My
    last post on Jeff Pfeffer’s next book, What
    Were They Thinking?     reminded me of Jeff’s recent research on how people in
    jobs where “time is money” fall into a trap: They start devoting more time
    to their jobs, and less time to “unpaid” activities like family, friends, and
    leisure. There is a splendid summary of
    this research on the Stanford Business School website,     Time
    is Money When You are Paid by the Hour    , “In a series of recent studies,
    Pfeffer and doctoral student Sanford E. DeVoe found that people who are used to
    being paid by the hour start thinking of time as a commodity almost equal to
    cash. And given the choice as to whether they’ll take time or green bills,
    they’ll usually take the latter—meaning they’re nearly always willing to put in
    more hours to get the pay.”

    Writer Marguerite Rigoglioso quotes Pfeffer
    further: “Being paid by the hour causes people to endorse the idea that they’d
    rather make more money and spend more time at work,” says Pfeffer, the Thomas
    D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior. “This shows how a commodified
    view of time spills over into how people view their personal and leisure time.”

    “Once you’re paid
    by the hour,” he says, “you start placing a monetary value on that hour. The
    opportunity costs of not working become clearer. People gravitate toward things
    that are easier to evaluate, and it’s easier to figure out the value of a paid
    hour than it is, say, the value of an hour spent in a leisure activity. So they
    chose work over play.”

    Pfeffer
    and DeVoe also review related research, including one study that found “lawyers
    watching their kids play soccer admitted to mentally ticking away lost income
    for each minute they stood on the sidelines.”

    Ouch… I feel sorry for both the kids and the parents.

    Unfortunately,
    many professional service firms – especially those like law firms that bill by
    the hour – systematically weed out people who don’t think and act this way, as
    they are less “profitable.”  This is the
    kind of research that gives me chills and makes me wonder if a little less
    “productivity” might be a good thing at times.

  • Jeff Pfeffer’s New Book: What Were They Thinking?

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    My co-author Jeff Pfeffer has a great new book coming out in July of this year, called "What Were They Thinking: Unconventional Wisdom About Management."   After writing two books with Jeff — and spending a lot of time in other ways as we are good friends — I love this book because it is so much like sitting down and talking with him.  It contains a series of "rational rants" — that is how I think of Pfeffer, an emotional and persuasive person, but one whose passions are driven by evidence and logic. Indeed, Jeff is one of the most prestigious and influential organizational theorists who has ever lived, and I suspect the most productive who has ever lived. So although his opinions on everything from stock options, to incentive pay, to leadership, to the suspect monetary value of most MBA degrees, to the sometimes questionable ethics of Stanford MBAs are filled with stories and passion, Jeff’s grasp of evidence and logic is always present. So, to me, although his ideas may strike some people as unconventional, what Pfeffer is doing is toppling the dangerous half-truths and total nonsense that so many people believe with facts — which are wrapped in  vivid examples so you can remember them and figure out how to use them (Just as the Heath brothers suggest in Made to Stick).  I don’t agree with every essay in the book — for example Jeff is more accepting of the virtues of assholes than I am — but that is why we look to work together. Indeed, two of our motto’s are "when two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary" and  "the more we fight the better write."

    Jeff’s other books (about 15 of them) are all "novels" that weave together disparate ideas into coherent themes. I think of this book as a collection of short stories glued together by the strength of  Pfeffer’s voice, values, and commitment to what is true rather than what makes people comfortable.  I have read every book that Pfeffer has ever written and many of his articles (indeed, people in our field joke that he has written so much that no one has read it all — including Jeff). I think that this is the most fun to read and is filled with ideas to help managers who strive to be humane and effective, to build organizations profit through their people and that develop rather than demean and destroy their "human resources."

  • Steve Jobs as the Poster Child for the Upside of Assholes

    Michael Malone has a great opinion column in today’s Wall Street Journal called iGenius, which digs into the question of why Apple under Steve Jobs continues to produce such great new designs, now the iPhone that — at first blush — will change what it means to carry a portable device. I too am constantly impressed with parade of products that have come out of Apple since Jobs returned, but also, let’s face it, Jobs has a track-record of demeaning others and taking credit for their work. 

    Malone — who once wrote a book about Jobs and his company — points out "there will always be things about him that are unforgivable — cruelties and manipulations (especially to Steve Wozniak), early crimes (illegal telephones, ironically), megalomania, and an unquenchable need to take credit from others (Do you know who led the original Mac team? Invented the iPod? Devised the new iPhone? I don’t think so) — and that no achievement will ever erase." And, as Malone concludes, despite all the smart people out there, competitors seem incapable mimicking Jobs’ ability to pull one rabbit after another out of the hat, and so, "For all his demons, thank God for him in this age of cookie-cutter CEOs. For a decade now (and for another decade at the beginning of the PC age) he has run the most enthralling and rewarding show in high-tech."

    I agree with Malone and, in fact, when I was writing The No Asshole Rule, one Silicon Valley insider after another after another argued to me "What about Steve Jobs, doesn’t he show how being an asshole make leaders and their companies more effective at times?  Doesn’t he show that assholes are worth the trouble" which led me to write a chapter on "The Virtues of Assholes" that starts out with the curious case of Steve Jobs, and goes onto make an empirical case for the upsides of assholes. BUT I also make clear that I still don’t want to work with assholes — there are plenty of other successful companies that aren’t led by assholes. Jobs is famous for saying the "the journey is the reward," and for my tastes, even if the journey ends well, it still sucks when you have to travel with an asshole, or worse yet, a pack of them.  If you are successful asshole, you are still an asshole and I don’t want to be around you.

  • Der Arschloch-Faktor

    Der Arshloch-Faktor is still hot in Germany.   It is currently the top business book and #22 overall on Amazon.  I am also getting a fairly constant stream of VERY emotional e-mails from German readers. Most contain troubling stories about acts of oppression and how people are fighting back. A couple are from people who worry that they are assholes — one asked me how he can go about finding out if he is an asshole. Most are supportive of the book, but I’ve received a couple from people (who I don’t think read the book based on the content, but I could be wrong) that just blasted me and argued that the book was going to make the problem worse  ather than better in German organziations.  I confess to be a bit overwhelmed by so many emotional emails. If German readers have any insights into both why they book seems to have struck a chord in your country and why the German’s who are writing me are even more vehment in their reactions than elewhere, I would be most grateful.

    Thanks and I thank all of you who bought Der Arshloch-Faktor.

  • Bob Nardelli at Home Despot: Style vs. Six Sigma

    Bruce Nussbaum has a wonderful post on the recently fired Bob Nardelli at Home Depot (or "Home Despot" as some employees started calling it), on why command and control is so bad.  Bruce argues that "Autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on process–cost and quality. Six Sigma measures all that stuff wonderfully. Nardelli couldn’t see beyond this. He hired dozens of command-and-control military guys to manage. He shifted Home Depot away from retail to a new contracting business that could more easily be controlled and measured." 

    I think Bruce is on to something, that if you want creativity and learning, command and control is bad. BUT I think his argument is right, but incomplete.  The fact is that close managerial oversight and constant criticism and feedback aren’t the only ways to drive down cost and increase quality.  In fact, these systems work best when employees have lots of data about cost and quality AND they police themselves rather than are policed by some boss.  That is part of the secret sauce of the Toyota Production system and of places like Southwest Airlines, Men’s Wearhouse, and DaVita — which runs hundreds of kidney dialysis centers at low cost while delivering the best quality in the business. It is also what I saw when I visited SuccessFactors a few weeks ago — not close supervision but people who worked to please and impress their co-workers and because they took pride in doing a good job — in fact these norms were so strong that rank and file employees felt safe about pressuring senior management to do their jobs better and senior management felt obligated to respond! 

    My message is that a numbers-based and quality focused organization need not be top down, where bosses use numbers to lord over and push around their underlings. In fact, to the extent that there is a peer culture that presses people to do the right thing and that has the right information, you don’t need to waste money on managers who watch people do the work — rather than doing it themselves.(I would love to see the numbers about the cost of management and supervision under Nardelli’s leadership — his salary alone drove these numbers way-up and paying all those people to do command and control must cost a lot of money).

    So I agree with Bruce for the most part, but want to emphasize that command and control does not equal lower cost and higher quality. Systems that run on peer control and great measures will be more efficient than those that depend on close managerial oversight– and in fact have higher quality, because it is one thing to fool a boss who comes by once in awhile, but fooling your peers every minute of the day is a lot harder.

    Finally, I don’t think that Nardelli’s reputation for arrogance helped him keep his job and — although I have no inside information to confirm this– I hope that another reason he was shown the door so abruptly was that the board decided to enforce the no asshole rule. Perhaps that is just my little dream, but I do think that when leaders are known as assholes AND their organization has performance problems, people lose their jobs a lot more quickly than when they are warm and well-liked leaders.

  • Publisher’s Weekly Interview

    Publisher’s Weekly is the leading magazine written for the "Book Publishing and Selling."  They wrote a nice review of The No Asshole Rule. This week, they published a short interview with me about the book called Assholes Beware!

  • Pam Slim on Bob Knight

    Pam Slim over at Escape from Cubicle Nation has a very thoughtful post on Bob Knight: The Perfect Mascot for "The No Asshole." As you probably already know, Knight becoming the "winningest college basketball coach of all time" this week. Pam uses ideas from The No Asshole Rule — and a lot of her own ideas too — to take on Knight’s accomplishments.  Her conclusion is:

    I think Bob Knight should have been stopped in his tracks a long time ago by his management and held accountable for his behavior.  His incredible talent and skill is overshadowed by juvenile behavior that is embarrassing to him and his family.  What a waste of a tremendous gift.  And what a disservice to the many young men he mentored as a coach.

    Pam has a lot more interesting stuff to say than that, and as always, writes with fire and creativity. And I agree with her assessment completely.

    P.S. If you want to get the in-depth story about Knight’s demeaning and egotistical antics, read John Feinstein’s compelling book A Season on the Brink.  Amazon suggests that it might be the best sports book ever written.

  • Made to Stick: Watch The Today Show on Wednesday January 3rd!

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    I’ve been talking about Made to Stick here for months. As I’ve said, it is one of the most important and useful management books I’ve ever read. I am always stunned at how Chip Heath grabs management audiences of all stripes when he talks about how to develop ideas that will people remember, use, and spread to others.  It is evidence-based and has fantastic stories. The book just came out and Amazon is now shipping it (I bought a lot of them, so I am getting the emails).  I am not the only one who is excited about the book. The national media is too. Check out these stories in USA Today and Time.  AND the Heath brothers are going to by on the Today Show tomorrow morning, Wednesday January 3rd, at some point between 7:30 and 8:00 AM. WOW!  Chip tells me that they have been rehearsing 25 second answers for their 5 minute segment! I can hardly wait to see them.

  • No Asshole Rule: The Video

    Adam Sodwick and his crew from 50Lessons visited Stanford last year, and they did a series of short interviews with me about five different management "lessons."  They were professional and quite fun to work with.  One of lessons was about The No Asshole Rule. Check it out if you want to see my short description of why I wrote the book.  Just click on the "play now" button. I have had this link listed on my blog from the start, but realized I never did a post on it when I got several inquiries from people who asked if I had any video on the book.

    50Lessons does unusually high quality videos and in fact has recently started working with Harvard Business School Press to distribute some of their material.