Jared Sandberg has a nice little discussion of the problem of working for a "yes man" in his Cubicle Culture column today in the Wall Street Journal. He was kind enough to interview me for it, and I found him to be an unusually smart — and straightfoward — journalist. In his column,I talk about how one problem with working for someone who says "yes" to everything is that their subordinates end-up doing lots of things, but without the time to do anything well. Plus I describe some of the research on innovation reviewed in Weird Ideas That Work that shows how some of the most creative people in organizations routinely ignore and defy their bosses.

I talk about the problem that subordinates face when their bosses insist that they implement some program or plan that is clearly a bad idea. To expand on that point, if arguing the facts with your boss doesn’t work and you don’t want to quit your job or get fired, sometimes the lesser of multiple evils is to strategic incompetence.

As Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote in Hard Facts, “Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, many managers and other employees face pressures to do things that aren’t just untested, but are known to be ineffective. In such cases, a challenge, a genuine moral dilemma can arise because, if they follow orders from superiors, people can knowingly harm their organizations, colleagues, and customers. We hesitate to recommend what might be called “evidence-based misbehavior.” But a case can be made that when leaders are wrong – and people don’t have the power to reverse their commands – that ignoring orders, delaying action, or implementing programs incompletely may be best for all involved.”

We go on to show how people trapped in such predicaments sometimes feel as if there is no other alternative to such passive resistance.  As we describe, I once spoke with the superintendents of two large school districts who were instructed to implement educational policies to “end social promotion”, policies that would result in flunking more kids.  These policies that have been shown in numerous studies to undermine both educational achievement and student graduation rates.

As we say in Hard Facts about these two superintendents, “So, both felt forced to go ahead and implement the policy anyway. But they were both doing it as slowly and incompletely as they could in their schools. Indeed, both explained – in defensive and somewhat angry tones — that, in perfect world that was free of politics, they wouldn’t have to act that way, but that their subtle resistance would result in the least damage to their schools and students. The message was that either they resisted that way, or they would get fired and replaced with someone who loved social promotion and would do far more harm. In short, resistance and foot-dragging isn’t always futile. A case can be made that evidence-based misbehavior is the best that you can do for your organization at times.”

Of course, this is a massively flawed soloution, but I thought that they made an interesting and persuasive argument, albeit one that does not appeal to the idealistic part of me, but one that may do the least harm in a bad situation.

P.S. I was amused to see that the Wall Street Journal editors elected not to print my assertion that working for yes men “sucks,” they censored it by printing “s—s.”  It didn’t even occur to me that “sucks” was an offensive word until I thought about it for awhile. Then I remembered that this isn’t the first time I have had that word censored by the Wall Street Journal.  The first time that I was quoted in the Journal was in 1988, and the article (about how irrevlevant much management research is to real world problems) ended with me saying “I’ve been in the real world.  It stinks.”  I was misquoted; I actually said “It sucks.” I guess they won’t be printing the name of my next book, The No Asshole Rule!

I am taken by the comments by people about my
post on Strong
Opinions, Weakly Held. Just as the
first time I heard this idea from Bob Johansen at the Institute for the Future, it strikes
many people as a compelling test of whether a person is wise or not. There is an intriguing footnote to all this
in Rich’s comment, where he points out that historian A. J. P. Taylor is
credited with a similar remark that was published in the 1970’s, describing
himself as having “Extreme views weakly held.” I also got a number of emails about other variations on this theme. I especially liked the one from Marc Garrett,
who writes since1968.com. Marc tells me the tagline he has been using
for several years is "Fierce opinions, briefly held, quietly disowned." I admire both the wisdom and the honesty in that statement.

I bet if
we dug into it enough, we could find variations of this saying that go back for
thousands of years. Certainly, the idea of having the courage to express
yourself and act, but to update your ideas when better facts and ideas come
along, goes back at least to Plato’s writings.  A lovely example of the impossibility of tracking
down who said what first can be found in a 1965 book by the late sociologist Robert C.
Merton, On
the Shoulders of Giants Merton
documents his quest to discover who first developed a saying that is often
attributed to Sir
Isaac Newton, “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants.” As Merton shows, Newton didn’t invent this
saying. The originator turns out to be
impossible to find, as this charming book shows. Merton – with the help of many colleagues —
finds variations that go back at least 1,000 years before Newton’s time. My favorite is  “A dwarf
standing on the shoulder of a giant may see farther than the giant himself.”

The
ignorance, arrogance, and lack of humility that too often goes along with
claims of originality has led me (as I said in an earlier post) to propose Sutton’s
Law in Hard Facts: “If you think that you have a new idea, you
are wrong. Someone else probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either;
I stole it from someone else”

PS: Merton’s son, also Robert
C. Merton, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1997 — quite a family!

The final point
that Jeff Pfeffer and I make in Hard Facts is about failure. We emphasize that is impossible to run an
organization without making a lot of mistakes. Innovation always entails
failure.  Most new products and companies don’t survive.  And if you want
creativity without failure, you are living in a fool’s paradise.  It is also impossible to learn something new
without making mistakes. A scary thought, for example, because new surgeons
have higher fatality rates than experienced surgeons – but new surgeons can
only learn so much by reading, watching others, and practicing on cadavers.  The only way to learn to do the real thing is
to do the real thing.  And every system
breaks down at times (even Toyota is having some quality missteps lately) and even the best-trained people make
mistakes at times.

Failure will never be eliminated, and so the
best we can hope for from human beings and organizations is that they
learn from their mistakes, that rather than making the same mistakes over and
over again, they make new and different mistakes.

The upshot for Jeff
Pfeffer and me is that, perhaps the single best diagnostic to see if an organization is
innovating, learning, and capable of turning knowledge into action is “What happens when they make a mistake?”
Stealing some ideas from research on
medical errors, leaders and teams can “forgive and forget,” which may be temporarily comforting,
but condemns people and systems to make the same mistakes over and over again –
in the case of hospitals, this means you bury the dead (or close the incision)
and don’t talk about it.  Or you can remember
who made mistakes, chase them down, humiliate them, and thus create climate of
fear. In such situations, the game becomes avoiding the finger of blame rather
than surfacing, understanding, and fixing mistakes (see Harvard’s Amy
Edmondson’s wonderful research on drug treatment errors for evidence on
this point).  Or you can Forgive
and Remember, which is not only the title of a great book by Charles Bosk,
it is the philosophy that the best teams and organizations use. You forgive
because it is impossible to run an organization without making mistakes, and
pointing fingers and holding grudges creates a climate of fear. You remember –
and talk about the mistakes openly –so people and the system can learn. And you
remember so that, even though you have tried to retrain people and teach them,
if some people keep making the same mistakes over and over again, then, well,
they need to be moved to another kind of job.

This brings me to
my recent episode with Amazon.  As
reported in an earlier post, I was having trouble with two of my books, where
the wrong information kept appearing and my publishers and I were having
trouble getting them to fix it.  As I
said, I wrote to jeff@amazon.com, as that
is supposed to be the CEO’s email.  I still don’t
whether it was really him who answered, but I got an immediate concerned response and promise to
look into it.  Within 48 hours it was
fixed and I got a detailed note from Mike
Frazzini at Amazon expressing concern and
apologizing, describing the steps they were taking to fix it, and inviting me
to talk with him further if I’d like. I was really impressed. As I wrote to Mike, I know it is impossible  to keep Amazon’s complex database running without
making errors, but the best that any human organization – or human-being – can do
is to respond to complaints and problems in a non-defensive way, and try to
learn from them.  They passed our “What
happens when they make a mistake” test with flying colors. The upshot of this
is that I am even a bigger fan of Amazon then when this whole episode started –
plus I wish that Jeff Bezo’s was CEO of my cell phone company!