I haven’t written anything for The Huffington Post for awhile, as I have been focusing on Work Matters.  But I thought it would be fun to start posting there again, at least every now and then.  I put-up a post called Title Tales: Weird Censorship and The No Asshole Rule.  Part 1 went up yesterday and Part 2 went up today. I list 13 different kinds of reactions that media sources and others have had to the book, tell some stories about them, and do a bit of analysis at the end. The reactions I talk about range from "We like the book but are afraid to say anything about it"  (NPR Morning Edition), to "You can use the word, but we can’t" (INC Magazine), we can use the word, but you can’t (Amazon.com), to "you can say "asshole" but not arse" (BBC radio).  I will continue to devote most of my blogging efforts here, but it was fun to do something different.

I’ve
written about dealing with asshole customers and clients here quite a bit,
including the NAP (No Asshole Policy) at the van Aartrijk Group, asshole management in the
wine industry, the use of “asshole taxes” for clients from hell, the UK-based consulting firm
that used evidence-based asshole
pricing, the challenges that doctors
have dealing with asshole patients, and along related lines, I developed The Flying Arse (a self-test
for asshole passengers).  I was recently reminded
about the damage that nasty clients do by an email from a discouraged manager
at a professional services firm. He lamented: “These
jerky people (whom I encounter ad nauseam at the highest levels in all Fortune
50 companies) sap the life out of our employees and make creating a
sustainable, culturally viable environment difficult. They are also poisonous
to innovation.” 

This pain expressed in his note helped me realize that, just as a lot of
people (over 135,000) have found the ARSE test (Asshole Rating Self-Exam) useful (and
entertaining), it might also be helpful to have a tool to assess whether or not
a client is a certified asshole. So,
with some great help from the people at Electric Pulp and some great feedback from
Mark Fortier and Diego Rodriguez, I
developed the 20 question Asshole
Client from Hell Exam (ACHE).

 

Consider a few sample items:

• My stomach churns whenever I have to email, meet, or talk
  on the phone with this client.

• When my client
  starts turning on the charm, then I really start worrying. It usually means
  that at an unreasonable request is coming.

• They keep asking me to do extra work, but don’t want to pay for it.

• If I am ever crazy enough to work for this client again, I will charge A
  LOT more money to compensate for the stress and aggravation (i.e., I will
  charge “assholes taxes.”)

Take
the ACHE at http://yourclientfromhell.com/.
You can use it to help decide if it is
worth continuing to work with a current client or if you want to charge them
“asshole taxes.” You can use it as an “asshole
screen” for future clients – send it to others who have worked with them to
find out if they are a client from hell.  And if you are a client, and feel like most
lawyers, management consultant, designers, accountants, and IT consultants that
you hire are complete idiots,  you find
yourself being gruff with them, and you find that fewer and fewer of them want
to work with you –- and those that do keep raising their rates beyond reason –-
you might take the ACHE as a self-test.  And you might get some of the people you’ve
worked with to complete the ACHE to get some feedback about what it is like to
work with you (if they feel safe enough to give you accurate feedback – you may
have unwittingly taught them to only give you good news).

I’d
would appreciate any reactions to the ACHE and any feedback about how to make
it better. And if you have any tips about how to deal with clients from hell, I
would love to hear them.

 

P.S.
Guy Kawasaki also has a post about
The No
Asshole Rule and the ACHE this morning. Guy has a cool new project rolling
out on Friday –- you might check How to Change the
World on Friday to learn about it.

I just got my copy of the latest issue of Greater Good in the mail.  I frankly had not even heard of this magazine (published out of UC Berkeley) until I was invited to contribute an article on how power can turn people in workplace jerks. But now that I’ve started following the magazine, I am most impressed, as they do wonderful job striking a balance between taking an evidence-based approach and publishing articles that everyone can enjoy and use.   They get all kinds of great people to write articles, like Philip Zimbardo and Daniel Goleman. The topics include things like forgiveness, why we ignore people who need help, compassion, and family.   You can read also the whole magazine online and download PDFs. Look around the current issues and past issues to find what strikes your fancy.

I was especially taken with Dacher Keltner’s article in current issue on The Power Paradox.  He argues that — contrary to the claims of many experts, going back to Machiavelli — that people who are selected for powerful positions and are able to hold them are characterized by modesty and empathy.  BUT he shows that being put in a position of power turns people into them into worse decision-makers, makes them ore likely to act on their whims and desires, and makes them more likely to interrupt others, to to speak out of turn, to fail to look at others when they are speaking, and to tease others in hostile ways.  I’ve written before (drawing on research by Keltner and others) that power can turn people into assholes; but his research and review suggests that it is even worse that: Power can turn people into stupid assholes!

Consider this gem from Keltner: My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like
patients who have damaged their brain’s orbitofrontal lobes (the region
of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that
seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the
experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your
skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and
socially-appropriate behavior."

I think they did a great job with issue on power, and I will be following the Greater Good closely.   

Fortune just came out with its top 100 Best Places to Work list.  I’ve written a lot about many of the companies on the list, as many have "no asshole rules" (albeit usually in more polite language).  Google is Number 1 again; as I wrote in The No Asshole Rule, Senior Executive Shona Brown had this great quote when I talked to her about the rule at Google, "It just isn’t efficient to be an asshole here."  When I gave a talk on the book at Google last March, I asked the audience about this, and they started telling fairly detailed stories about how — because teamwork is so important to them and because their status system emphasizes who has the best ideas and gets the most done above all else– that acting like a bully was a career limiting move.  In fact, after the talk, a woman came up to me and kind of whispered to me "I am really not a very nice person, but I have to act nice here, or I can’t get anything done."  That’s a pretty strong testament to the power of strong social norms.

I have known Shona a long time as she was a doctoral student in our program at Stanford.  I have two favorite memories of her.  The first, which shows how far she has traveled, is that she was so broke when she came to Stanford that I loaned her, I think, $300.  She paid me back promptly!  The second is that she was asked by the local Palo Alto paper something like "What mythical figure would you want to be."  Her answer was "Santa Claus, because I love children and love to travel."  Great answer.

Back to the 100 best places. Some of the other firms on the list that I have written about include #29 SAS Institute , #44 Plante & Moran, #55 Perkins Coie, and  #87 Yahoo!.   I was also especially pleased to see financial services firm  Robert  W. Baird was listed as #39. And they were described as follows:

I will look into Baird more closely, as I hope to add them to my honor roll of companies that have the rule. If you have any more information about them and how they apply the rule, please get in touch with me. 

The University of Florida just put out a press release about an article published by Amir  Erez and Christine Porath in the Academy of Management Journal in October.  Erez reports that "We found that even when the rude behavior is pretty mild, it impairs a
person’s cognitive functioning and has spillover effects in how they
treat their co-workers.”  The press release goes on to say:

‘[T}he students who were treated rudely, or even imagined they had
been, solved fewer anagrams, recalled less information and found fewer
and less creative uses for a brick. They might suggest it be “used as a
door stop,” for example, instead of “selling it on e-Bay” or “hanging
it from a wall in the museum and calling it abstract art.”

The
study also tested participants’ willingness to help by having the
experimenter drop some books or pencils. Whether the rude behavior was
directed at them by the experimenter or delivered by a third party
assumingly unrelated to the study or the experimenter, they picked up
fewer books and pencils, if they chipped in to help at all.’

This controlled experiment compliments qualitative and quantitative research, which provide an ever growing pile of evidence that assholes aren’t just annoying, they undermine workplace effectiveness. The list of items to add to the Total Cost of Assholes seems to grow each day.

Buddy Rich
was a famous jazz band leader and drummer, who was billed as the
greatest drummer in the world.  He lived from 1917 to 1987 and was
especially well-known for his West Side Story Medley and his frequent
appearances on the Johnny Carson Show.  Rich was generally described as an
upbeat and friendly person, but was also known for his temper.  A No Asshole Rule
reader named Bob was kind enough to point me to a recording of Rich’s
famous tirade at his band, which was secretly recorded on his bus by
one of the members.  Rich clearly was well-loved by many and, at
least from what I can uncover, did not seem to be a certified asshole.
But I don’t know if I have ever heard a better — or worse — example
of a temporary asshole in action.  The entertainment value is
extremely high. You can hear it it here (there is no video, but what a sound track!).

P.S. Thanks to Bob from Utah for telling me about this recording.

I argued in my book that, if the congressional record and media reports were correct, that it was fair to label John Bolton (former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations) as a certified asshole.  I was also careful to make clear that this opinion was based on reports about his personal behavior, not on his political views (indeed, I label several democrats as assholes, including Steve Jobs).

Bolton has been called an asshole by the liberal media, including the Village Voice and at least one blog. But now even the fairly conservative Economist magazine seems to agree in a review of Bolton’s book that they titled "Looking Back in Anger." They didn’t use the A-word, but if you look at this review of his book, Surrender is Not An Option, that seems to be their message.

Here is the Economist’s opening paragraph of their review:

"SURELY even John Bolton cannot be quite as curmudgeonly as this? In a
memoir devoted mainly to his nearly six years of government service
under President George Bush, America’s former ambassador to the United
Nations has a bad word for almost everyone who dared stand up to him.
This is odd. One of his attractions has always been his willingness to
argue it out with his opponents: when other neocons went missing in
action, he defended the cause. Yet in this book, this undeniably
talented man of principle often comes across as a domineering bully."

Alas, the (then Republican controlled) congress did try to apply the no asshole rule, and seemed to be on the verge of rejecting him after all the nasty stories about his personal behavior came out in the hearing.  But the Bush administration used a loophole in the rules to appoint him to the position during a recess.  Looking back, no matter if you agree or disagree with his politics, I can’t see how appointing someone to a diplomatic post who has a known history of demeaning and disrespecting others can possibly be a wise move.  And the evidence was clear at the time, as Carl Ford, former head of the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told congress that Bolton  was  "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy" whose efforts to intimidate underlings raised "real questions about
his suitability for high office."

To put it in another context, would you hire someone for a job that required tact and gaining the cooperation of others who was known as a "kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy?"