Work Matters

  • Warning Signs About Your Future Boss: A Checklist

    About a year ago, Guy Kawasaki and I worked with the folks at LinkedIn to develop a ten-point checklist to help people detect whether their future boss is likely to be an asshole. — things to look for during the interview process and when doing background checks on a future employer and company. I went back and look at this list and realized that, although it emphasizes asshole bosses, that many of these are also more general warning signs that your future boss isn't just a jerk, but is more broadly a crummy manager.

    With so many people looking for new jobs, and almost every organization I know reorganizing, there are a lot of people looking for new bosses now or, as a result of a reorganization, considering multiple internal offers for a new job with a new boss.  I thought it was a good time to reprint the list. Note that this is also in Guy's new book Reality Check, with a host of other insights on this challenge (See Chapter 87).

    As I wrote earlier on this blog, "Discovering the answers to these questions before you take a job can save you a lot of heartache."

     Here is our 10 point checklist.  Check-off each one that applies to your future boss. 

    ___1. Kisses-up and kicks-down:
    “How does the prospective boss respond to feedback from people higher
    in rank and lower in rank?” “Can you provide examples from experience?”
    One characteristic of certified assholes is that they tend to demean
    those who are less powerful while brown-nosing their superiors.

    ___2. Can’t take it:
    “Does the prospective boss accept criticism or blame when the going
    gets tough?” Be wary of people who constantly dish out criticism but
    can’t take a healthy dose themselves.
           

    ___3. Short fuse    :
    “In what situations have you seen the prospective boss lose his
    temper?” Sometimes anger is justified or even effective when used
    sparingly, but someone who “shoots-the-messenger” too often can breed a
    climate of fear in the workplace. Are co-workers scared of getting in
    an elevator with this person?
     

    ___4. Bad credit:
    “Which style best describes the prospective boss: gives out gratuitous
    credit, assigns credit where credit is due, or believes everyone should
    be their own champion?” This question opens the door to discuss whether
    or not someone tends to take a lot of credit while not recognizing the
    work of his or her team.

    ___5. Canker sore:
    “What do past collaborators say about working with the prospective
    boss?” Assholes usually have a history of infecting teams with nasty
    and dysfunctional conflict. The world seems willing to tolerate
    talented assholes, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
                 

    ___6. Flamer:
    What kind of email sender is the prospective boss? Most assholes cannot
    contain themselves when it comes to email: flaming people,
    carbon-copying the world, blind carbon copying to cover his own
    buttocks. Email etiquette is a window into one’s soul.

    ___7. Downer:
    “What types of people find it difficult to work with the prospective
    boss? What type of people seem to work very well with the prospective
    boss?” Pay attention to responses that suggest “strong-willed” or
    “self-motivated” people tend to work best with the prospective boss
    because assholes tend to leave people around them feeling de-energized
    and deflated.

    ___8. Card shark:
    “Does the prospective boss share information for everyone’s benefit?” A
    tendency to hold cards close to one’s chest—i.e., a reluctance to share
    information—is a sign that this person treats co-workers as competitors
    who must be defeated so he or she can get ahead.
                       

    ___9. Army of one:
    “Would people pick the prospective boss for their team?”
    Sometimes there is upside to having an asshole on your team, but that
    won’t matter if the coworkers refuse to work with that person. Use this
    question to help determine if the benefit of having the prospective
    boss on your team outweighs any asshole behaviors.

    ___10. Open architecture: “How would the prospective boss respond if a copy of The No Asshole Rule appeared on her desk?” Be careful if the answer is, “Duck!”

    Scoring:

    If you checked 3 or more, then it sounds like your future boss is a borderline asshole.

    If you checked 5 or more, he or she sounds like a certified asshole.

    If you checked more than 7, you've got a flaming bosshole on your hands — and also someone who is incompetent in a host of other ways.

    I would love to hear other tips about
    what has helped you avoid taking a job with an asshole boss — or
    other warning signs that you wish you would have noticed before going to work for a demeaning creep.   

    P.S. You can also use the Asshole Rating Self-Exam, or ARSE, to assess a future (or current boss) — just have the people you are interviewing about the future boss complete with that person in mind (rather than themselves).

  • Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford: Open to All

     This coming week, the amazing folks at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program will kick-off "E-Week" on campus.  The amazing Tina Seelig and on Tom Byers are putting on quite a show. The poster is below, but go here to really check it out.

    E Week

  • Is the Kindle a Disruptive Innovation? If You Ran a Large Publishing House What Would You Do?

    The new forthcoming version of the Amazon Kindle has got pretty good reviews.  Predicting the future is impossible, but I saw one possible scenario when I looked at my sales as an Amazon Associate for this month (I am not getting rich off this, but the hundred or so bucks a month that I earn is nice and I enjoy spending it on Amazon).  Of the six books that people bought by connecting to Amazon through Work Matters yesterday, four were for Kindles.  And, looking at the month to date (through February 14th), people bought 39 traditional books and 11 for Kindles.  This is horrible sample to base any decision on, but it is instructive to ask "suppose this is the future?"  As science fiction William Gibson once wrote (if I have this right),
    "The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed." 

    The publishing industry might be facing a scenario straight out of Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma — the incumbents die or decline deeply because they can't break free from their routines and internal power structures, and the new entrants race in and win.  Indeed, Border's has hired bankruptcy lawyers, while — despite the downturn — Amazon had a record Christmas season.   And there is plenty of fear in the book business that their problems aren't
    just caused by the downturn, but also by disruptive innovations that
    will rival what we have seen happen to the music and newspaper
    industries. The Kindle might not be the winner, in fact, there is a good chance that the ipod and iphone will be (especially if Apple comes out with a bigger itouch, for both seeing movies and reading books more easily… they have the infrastructure already and related skills).

     If I were a book publisher, I wouldn't just hunker down, cut costs, and do what I've always done until the downturn is over.  I would work to bring in people from outside the industry who understand the web and let them try some experiments — and if I was a venture capitalist, I would be looking for start-ups that can rush in and replace those giant but shrinking publishing houses in New York City.  History and the evidence is not on their side.  It is impossible to know which firms or technologies will replace them, but the odds they will be replaced by something different look pretty good to me.  Any publishing executive who believes that the best way to ride out the downturn is with a company that is an exact imitation of what they had in the past is living in a fool's paradise.  The process of cost-cutting all too often results in a "a puny but otherwise perfect replicant" of the old organization, which is only the right thing to do if the future is a perfect imitation of the past.  This is almost certainly not the case in the book business.

    Having said all this, however, sniping from the sidelines is one thing, but figuring out how to navigate through these tough times is another thing.

    If you were CEO of a large publishing house, what would you do? 

  • Unilateral Contempt: A-Rod Demonstrates the Look of an Arrogant Asshole

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    I was stopped in my tracks by the above picture in today's New York Times.  It was part of this article where the renowned psychologist Paul Ekman analyzed A-Rod's "micro-expressions" during a 2007 60 Minutes interview to glean hints of whether A-Rod was lying or telling the truth about his steroid use.   (Check-out Ekman's Telling Lies to learn about the impressive research methods and how he applies them; it is also the science beneath the — rather lame — Fox TV series "Lie to Me.")

    I had such a strong reaction to the above picture of A-Rod (the middle of the three in the article) because I realized that it captured the exact expression displayed by one of the biggest — perhaps the biggest — asshole I have ever worked with in my life.  He flashed that look constantly to those around him, often mixing it with an even more explicitly hostile glare (Sorry, no more details… to protect both the innocent and the guilty).  Ekman's called this microexpression "unitlateral contempt,"  which he defined as "a tightening and raising of the corner of the
    lip that can indicate arrogance or a feeling a moral superiority."       Ekman then adds "He does them very frequently … It doesn't fit with anything he says."   Ekman adds that more research is needed to determine if this is just a tic do to the stress of being on TV or something he does routinely and is a true indication of arrogance or a feeling of moral superiority.  But, following my earlier post, it appears there is some evidence to support the headline indicating the A-Rod is an A-hole in the New York Post. )

    In other words, some of the most rigorous psychological research suggests that this is the look flashed by someone who is, at least temporarily, acting like an arrogant asshole.  And if people — like my former co-worker — do it across times and situations, it suggests that they are certified arrogant assholes.  I would love to see A-Rod's score on the ARSE by the way!

    I am curious, do others have the same reaction this microexpression that I do?

  • 5127 Failed Prototypes: James Dyson and his Vacuum Cleaner

    Dyson James Dyson is the inventor of the successful and now common Dual Cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner.  I did a session yesterday on design thinking with a group of executive MBA's yesterday. One who had consulted to the company pointed out that Dyson — supported by his wife's job as an art teacher — took five years and 5127 failed prototype to develop on that worked.  If failure sucks but instructs, that is a lot of learning.  It also is an interesting case because it shows how difficult it is to make rational decisions in the innovation process.  Certainly, say 4000 prototypes and 4 years into the adventrue, any reasonable person would have assumed that this was a failure, an extreme case of escalating commitment to a failed course of action.  As I have written here before, James March described this aspect of creativity elegantly:

    "Unfortunately,
    the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination
    are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good
    ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most
    fantasies lead us astray, and most of
    the consequences of imagin    ation for individuals and individual
    organizations
    are disastrous. Most deviants end up on
    the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational
    transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as
    unjust
    in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual
    organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among
    alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the
    innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism)."

    If you want to learn more about Dyson's quest, I suggest his autobiography, Against the Odds.

  • Peter’s Prognosis and Peter’s Paralysis: Timeless Wisdom from The Peter Principle

    A few months back, I was given the privilege of writing the forward to the 40th Anniversary Edition of The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, written by Dr. Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull (both deceased).  It remains a masterpiece. Very much like Up the Organization, it somehow manages to be both a kind of charming historical piece and completely relevant to the times. And I think it remains the funniest useful management book ever written.  I will be writing more about it now and then, as it is coming-out in April.

    I was reading through it again this morning, and even though it is has been just a couple months, it seems even more relevant now, especially the main thesis the hierarchies tend to naturally and powerfully propel people up the ladder until they achieve "final placement" at their level of incompetence.  The book is especially masterful at revealing all the tricks that incompetent people to avoid revealing their incompetence; this morning, I realized that Peter and Hull had beat us to the punch by 30 years in identifying what we called "the smart talk trap" in The Knowing-Doing Gap, the notion that managers often use talk, planning, endless study, and so on as a substitute for taking action.  They provide a list of Substitution techniques; they define substitution as "Instead of carrying out the proper duties of his position he substitutes for them some other duties, which he carries out to perfection." 

    My favorite technique is what they call "Peter's Prognosis," which happens because the "The True Substituter can never get enough to evidence" to act."  They explain the logic behind this technique is it "Spend sufficient time in confirming the need, and the need will disappear."  They point out, for example, that if a famine relief study goes on long enough, the need for the relief will eventually disappear!"

    Alas, it is true that too many organizations reward such behavior rather than taking action. As I have written here before, the best bosses and organization strike the right balance with the attitude of wisdom, acting on the best knowledge they have right now, doubting what they know, and updating their beliefs and actions as better information comes along.

    P.S. I would also point out that Peter's Prognosis is especially pertinent to these tough times as so many organizations are afraid to act, so they keep studying and studying what to do, and since they always need more information and never come up with the perfect answer, they do take no action, and their products are never completed or sold.  So rather than ever actually putting the product out there, they act like Homer in this cartoon, who says "Trying is the first step toward failing."  This might be called Peter's Paralysis.

  • Asshole Boss of the Year?

    There is a lot competition out there for asshole boss of the year, more than ever. But the peanut guy seems to be well in lead if this AP story is correct. I quote the lead:

    WASHINGTON – The owner of a peanut company urged his workers to ship
    tainted products after receiving test results identifying salmonella,
    according to internal company e-mails disclosed Wednesday by a House committee.

    The
    company e-mails obtained by the House panel showed that Peanut Corp. of
    America owner Stewart Parnell ordered the shipments tainted with the
    bacteria because he was worried about lost sales.

  • Reward Success and Failure, Punish Inaction

    This is idea #6 from Weird Ideas That Work.  Unfortunately, even though there is massive evidence that innovation is impossible without action, that no learning or creativity is possible without failure either, we have entered an era of fear.  I feel it everywhere, in every industry, even among the companies and people who are riding out the bad times well.  The unstated motto these days is "Reward Success and Inaction, Punish Failure."  This is a perfect recipe for REAL failure.  It seems that trying and failing are now out of fashion.  I am not saying urging people to take risks that are too big, as Diego says, you need a place and a time for failing.  Just as I have argued about the virtues of small wins, I believe that one of the keys to getting out of this mess if for all of us to find ways to accept and learn from small loses. 

    It is worth remembering research on difference between the most creative and successful people versus their more ordinary peers.  Einstein and da Vinci had more bad ideas than their peers.  Babe Ruth struck out more.  That is because they acted, failed, learned, and kept moving forward. 

    As I wrote here about 18 months ago:

    "U.C. Davis Professor Dean Keith Simonton,
    who has spent much of his career doing long-term quantitative studies
    of creative genius,  has concluded that a high failure rate is a
    hallmark of creative geniuses — he concludes that the most creative
    people — scientists,  composers, artists, authors, and on and on —
    have the greatest number of failures because they do the most stuff. 
    And he can find little evidence that creative geniuses have a higher
    success rate than their more ordinary counterparts; they just take more
    swings at the ball. Check out his book Origins for Genius , perhaps the most complete review of research on the subject." 

    Some advice for all of us… I am having trouble following too, I confess, but let's try:

    1. Take a little risk.

    2. Try something you are bad it

    3.  Encourage someone who has given their all and failed — don't humiliate or punish them.

    4.  Remember that by insisting on perfection and worrying too much that something bad will happen, you preclude the possibility that something great happen  — or of suffering failure that will teach you a lesson that will make you a huge success the time after.

    5.  Talk about your mistakes and let others know what you have learned from them.

    6. Punish inaction.

    7. Punish CYA behavior — that isn't the kind of action we need right now.  (I put-up a snide post about A-Rod yesterday, but I have to applaud him for admitting his mistake. John Thain –and Barry Bonds — could learn something from him.)

    It is time for a little movement.  In this spirit, I had the idea of putting up a picture of an Ex-Lax box on this post to convey that message.  I decided not to do it, but I am going to take the little risk. Is it in bad taste? Probably, but I hope it helps you remember the message.

    Ex Lax 

    P.S. Speaking of Ex-Lax, this is one my favorite "asshole boss" revenge stories.  See tip #3.

  • Paint the Walls Blue To Boost Creativity?

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    I've always thought that people who believed that motivation was affected by the colors of walls and so on were deluding themselves.  Science has a new study that suggests I may be wrong.  Researchers found that people doing tasks with a blue background on their computer monitors were more creative. And, as reported on the fantastic web site BPS Research Digest:

    In yet another experiment, participants were given twenty "parts" from
    which to design a child's toy. Participants given red parts designed
    toys that independent judges rated to be more practical and
    appropriate, but less original and novel. By contrast, participants
    given blue parts came up with more creative toy designs.

    Check out the BPS link for other nuances of how color affects performance.

    I remain a bit skeptical, but — given my commitment to evidence-based management — I am less skeptical than before I read this research.  And I am not going to change the blue background that I've had on my computer monitor for several years just in case!

    Here is the reference:

    Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu (2009). Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances. Science. In Press.

  • On Being a “Fully Present” Boss

    Last week, I was at an off site for a local company, and they had an eight-person panel composed of four bosses and a subordinate for each.  The bosses talked about how they worked to engage and motivate people, and the subordinates talked about how each boss operated and what they had learned from him or her. 

    One of the bosses talked about the importance of being fully present, an old but important theme that was emphasized in the Fish books. I was especially intrigued by his comment that, during conference calls, he turns off his computer screen so he can be fully present during the call –and not fall prey to the usual temptations of surfing the web and checking e-mail. 

    I love that tip.

    It also reminded me, however, of a CEO who did the exact opposite — turning the volume off on her phone to avoid hearing the insults and foul language spewed out by a nasty board member.   Being fully present is a wonderful thing in healthy relationships, but there are times when detachment has its virtues.