Work Matters

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss is Shipping in Paperback: A Look Back

     

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    Good Boss, Bad Boss is already shipping in paperback at Amazon, today is the official publication date.  It has a new red cover (which I like, I hope it isn't too intense for you) and a new chapter, an Epilogue called "What Great Bosses Do: Lessons I've l Learned Since Writing Good Boss, Bad Boss."  Fast Company already published an excerpt from the new chapter on power poisoning and will be publishing more snippets in the coming weeks. 

    This all got me thinking about Good Boss, Bad Boss, about all the fun I had fretting over and talking with people about ideas in the book, and about lots of others ideas about bosses too, since the book was first published in September, 2010.  In doing so, I looked back on some of the most popular posts and related stories on bosses.  These include:

    1. Being a Good Boss is Pretty Damn Hard — Reflections on Publication Day

    2. Lessons from Nightmare (and Dream) Bosses — INC Interview

    3. How to Be a Good Boss — by Matt May

    4. When the Shit Hits the Fan, Women are Seen as Better Bosses than Men

    5. Drinking at Work — It's not all bad — a piece for Cnn.Com

    6. Is it Sometimes Rationally to Select Leaders Randomly?

    7. Clueless and Comical Bosses: Please Help Me With Examples

    8. A Cool Neurological Explanation for the Power of Small Wins

    9. How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything — a Wall Street Journal piece I wrote

    10. What are Good Things About Having a Lousy Boss?

    11. Pixar Lore: The Day Our Bossses Saved Our Jobs — at HBR.org

    12. David Kelley on Love and Money

    I could have added a lot more — let me know which ones you like, which ones you don't form the above list, and which ones I should have added from the past six years or so I've been writing Work Matters. Thanks so much for everything

  • The No Asshole Rule in One Company: A Simple Decision-Tree

    I recently posted an updated version  of People and Places that Use The No Asshole Rule.  In that spirit, a group of students in my class Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach did a little case study of how a local start-up (with about 150 people now) is sustaining a civilized workplace.  I liked this simple decision-tree as it captures much of the essence of how to enforce the rule — assuming they actually use this rather than just talk about it!

    Jerk Decision Tree

  • Greetings and Bathrooms: One CEO’s Metrics for Retail Stores

    Yesterday, we had the CEO of a large retail chain as a visitor in the Stanford class we Huggy Rao and I are teaching on scaling-up excellence.  I will refrain from using his name as this a class, not a speech to the public.  But he said something  interesting in response to a question about the challenge of "descaling bad behavior."  When I asked what the "warning signs" he looked for during store visits, signs that management was slipping, he offered two metrics (which he said could be applied to many others retail settings too):

    1.   Am I — and other customers — warmly greeted by employees when they enter the store?  He said this was a general sign that employees were focusing on customers.  He added that the small social connection and associated feeling of obligation makes it a bit harder for people to walk out of the store without buying anything. 

    2. Are the bathrooms clean?  He joked that people in his company must think he has a small bladder because he is always asking to go the bathroom.  He argued that dirty bathroom are a sign that the managers and employees are failing to execute in other ways, and because customers react so negatively to dirty bathrooms, it was especially bad for motivating sales and return visits.

    He said that, when he spots these signs, he immediately has a huddle with the store manager and employees to explain why they are of such concern to him and to persuade them to start changing their behavior right away.  He also emphasized that his firm uses all kinds of quantitative measures to run the stores, but as he pointed out, these simple measures add something that can't be seen just from looking at the numbers.

    Ireally liked the elegance of his two measures and how he tied them to his immediate actions.

    I wonder, what other simple measures do you use — as a customer or manager — to assess if a store is being ran well or badly?

    P.S. I was sitting next to a marketing professor from another university during the talk. He argued that if you look at Wal-Mart's recent financial challenges (which the press seems to attribute to such deep cuts in the merchandise prices), part of the problem may be that they are failing along the lines suggested by this veteran CEO.  As he noted, Wal-Mart is eliminating some greeters and moving others away from the entrance; an article in RetailWire comments on reduced and altered use of greeters: "A lot of changes have taken place at Walmart over the years since Sam Walton's passing, but the latest may have him flipping over in his grave. "  That marketing professor also asserted the cleanliness of Wal-Mart bathrooms have slipped in recent years (This is hearsay as I am not a regular Wal-Mart customer; I did try to look online for evidence to support the claim, and while there were individual complaints, I didn't see any systematic evidence one way or another).

  • Standing on the Sun: Chris Meyer’s and Julia’s Kirby’s Imaginative Masterpiece

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    About a decade ago, I was talking with Jeff Pfeffer as he raved about Competing for the Future, the 1996 strategy classic written by Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad.  Jeff drives me crazy sometimes — he  is never wishy-washy anything. But I always listen closely to him because, after all, he is one of the most productive organizational researchers on the planet and one of the three or four most influential organizational theorists of all time.  Jeff argued that the book was so important because it not only contained new and emotionally compelling ideas — some backed by strong data, others that were important to test with good data in the future — it contained more intriguing ideas per page than any popular and well-written business book he had ever read.

    Well, there is a new book that qualifies for the same praise: Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Will Change Business Everywhere.  The ideas here come rapidly but it is so well-written that you don't realize how thoroughly and intensely you are learning new things and the rate at which your assumptions are being challenged.  I am biased, but I credit Julia Kirby for this rare magic. Chris is a smart guy, but he has never edited me so perhaps I am not giving him enough credit. Julia — an "Editor at Large" at HBR –  is the best and smartest business writer I have ever worked with.  There are a lot of good editors out there who make your prose and flow better, but Julia is the only one I know who not only makes your ideas better, she relentlessly adds new ones and challenges you with logic and data when she thinks you are wrong or your logic is sloppy. 

    Chapter 5 on "Pseudocompetition," for example, unmasks and brings down much of the current hype about size, scale, and competition.  At one point, we hear about a Harvard Business Review author who claimed that "industries were in flux, with many becoming more disaggregated and competitive as many others become more concentrated."  Well, Julia checked the facts, and as the book says "No dice." This guy was largely wrong, something called the Hirschmann-Herfindahl indexes (the gold standard for measuring market power) showed that — except for a couple "small potatoes" industries — every other industry is becoming more concentrated.

    To get out of the weeds, this is the most complete and creative book I know on how the world economy is changing and what it means for the strategies and tactics that leaders all over the world need to implement.   Reading the book is a compelling journey, as Meyer and Kirby first explain the key features of the new capitalism that is emerging around the world and then provide advice for businesses and leaders in this new world.

    I found the "operating principles" developed in Chapter 9 to be especially especially interesting . These include:

    Rule One: Learn to See Results in Color

    Old formulation: Measure financial returns to shareholders.

    New formulation: Measure the real value sought by stakeholders.

    Rule Two: Internalize Externalities

    Old formulation: Externalize every cost you can.

    New formulation: Own your impact, negative and positive.

    Rule Four: Give it Away Until You Charge for It

    Old formulation: Focus on your particular value-adding capability and outsource all the rest (except where transaction costs are prohibitive).

    New formulation: Pursue collaborative gains through invisible handshakes.

    The surrounding discussion around these and the other operating rules are wonderful, and each helped me think of the capitalist world we now live in through a new perspective.  Indeed, Rule Four challenges some of the ideas — or at least translations –  about "core competence" that emerged from Competing for the Future.  And I find Rule Two quite interesting in light of what Apple is learning about the responsibility it needs to take for the alleged mistreatment of employees at supplier Foxconn where wages just went up 25% as well as the environmental impact of suppliers who build their products — in fact, they just announced environmental audits.   These recent moves by Apple suggest they are stepping up to "own" both their positive and negative impact — and as Chris and Julia suggest, they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it because it is necessary for protecting Apple's reputation and legitimacy.

    Standing on the Sun is not a quick and mindless read.  But if you want an unusually well-written book that is chock-full of new insights about the capitalist world we now live in and about what leaders and businesses can do to survive and thrive in these deeply weird and disconcerting times, this is the book for you.

  • Eliminating the Negative at the Atlanta Schools

    Today's New York Times has a compelling story about the steps new superintendent Erroll B. Davis Jr is taking to clean-up the Atlanta schools, which were tainted by test score scandals — with teachers and principals cheating in almost half the schools-– that was apparently fueled by pressure and fear created by the previous (and now disgraced) superintendent Beverly L. Hall.  As the Times explains:

    "For years, Beverly L. Hall, the former school superintendent here, ruled by fear. Principals were told that if state test scores did not go up enough, they would be fired — and 90 percent of them were removed in the decade of Dr. Hall’s reign.Underlings were humiliated during rallies at the Georgia Dome. Dr. Hall permitted principals with the highest test scores to sit up front near her, while sticking those with the lowest scores off to the side, in the bleachers."

    The interesting thing about the story to me is that Davis is behaving in ways that follow directly from one of my favorite academic articles, Bad is Stronger than Good.  He is working to eliminate the negative at every turn, immediately firing a teacher who allegedly supplied test scores students (he says he might get sued, but doesn't care), removing tainted senior administrators at a high rate, and during one of his many visits to schools he observed a toilet was clogged and made sure it was fixed before he left. He has also eliminated practices that Hall used that conveyed her superiority, isolation, and mistrust — she did things like insisting that all questions be submitted in writing when she spoke in public so they could be screened.

    Rather than her "Queen of the Ivory Tower" management style, Davis is out and about in the schools and the community eliminating the negative when he sees it, and as the psychologists who wrote "Bad is Stronger Than Good" advised,spreading around positive words and deeds at such a rapid pace that the negative is overwhelmed.

    Most notably, rather than hiding in his ivory tower, he is visiting school after school and thanking everyone he sees for their good work.  And rather than treating teachers as objects of scorn, blame, and mistrust, he says things to principals like “Education is the only industry in this country where failure is blamed on the workers, not the leadership.”

    Finally, Davis has made an interesting symbolic change to send the signal that helping kids, not jacking-up tests scores through any means possible, is what matters most.  The Times reports:

    "When Dr. Hall was the superintendent, she covered one wall in her office with bar graphs showing the test results for all 100 city schools. After Mr. Davis became superintendent, he took the test scores down and replaced them with large color photographs of Atlanta schoolchildren."

    As I noted here recently, my colleague Huggy Rao and I are working on book scaling-up excellence , and teach a related class at Stanford. One of the hallmarks of leaders who scale excellence is that they "make way" for it by removing bad behaviors and emotions that interfere with and turn attention and effort away from doing good things.  The methods that Erroll B. Davis Jr is using to turn around the Atlanta school system don't just provide lessons for other educational leaders, they demonstrate a mindset and actions that leaders of almost any group or organization can use to eliminate the negative — especially to drive-out fear. 

  • Larry Page, My Wife’s Lament, and Reading on Books vs. Screens

    A couple weeks back, my wife Marina and I were talking about the Kindle we share. She made an interesting observation: Although she loves the convenience of the thing and enjoys reading books on it, she doesn't remember what she reads on it nearly as well as a regular book. 

    I thought that was pretty insightful — it rang true to me.   I often buy books — both for pleasure and research — on the Kindle and also find reading on the Kindle to be just fine (although I prefer books because of the the tactile experience). But I've figured out that if I am using the book for my writing and research, especially for a long-term writing project, I need to have a physical copy someplace nearby where I see the cover now and then.  Otherwise, I forget about it. 

    This means that I often buy two copies of a book –one for the Kindle and the other to stack next to my computer.  I often am too impatient to wait for the book to come in the mail or to go to the bookstore, so I buy on the Kindle, and then buy a hard copy if I like it.  I need a copy of the book to remind of what I've learned and might need — something I reinforce it by flipping through each of the 30 or so books I keep in stacks all around me (and the stack of 100 or so articles I've printed out as well) to remind me of stuff I need to remember.

    Perhaps it is just Marina and me, but I started wondering if there was any research on the differences between how well people remember things they read in digital versus paper form.  I did a quick look and didn't find any, but in doing so, I recalled a conversation that Jeff Pfeffer and I had with Google's Larry Page in (I think)  2002  (We did an interview with him and then had lunch; this was before Google was a public company.).   At one point in the conversation, when we asked him about obstacles to Google's success, he said something quite interesting: Research shows that people read considerably slower when they read things on a screen than in paper form. I recall him saying 15% to 20% — a number supported by research done a few years earlier).

    I nosed around the web a bit and found some 2010 research on tablets versus books by Jakob Nielsen that confirmed Larry's point persists in the modern era– although it looks like the difference between screens and books is less than the research Larry was talking about. Here is the report and I reprint the key findings:

    Results: Books Faster Than Tablets

    The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability.

    Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can't say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed. In any case, the difference would be so small that it wouldn't be a reason to buy one over the other.

    But we can say that tablets still haven't beaten the printed book: the difference between Kindle and the book was significant at the p<.01 level, and the difference between iPad and the book was marginally significant at p=.06.

    This research doesn't dig into reading comprehension, let alone longer-term memory. But that nearly 11% difference is quite substantial when you think about how much many of us read.  And, perhaps I am being sentimental, but it is lovely to see that those old-fashioned books still have an evidence-based edge!

    What do you think?  Do you feel like you read slower and recall less when you read on screen versus real paper?  And is this an affliction only suffered by me and perhaps other other old-timers who learned to read on paper alone?

    P.S. If you want to nerd out, I just found a pretty detailed review of this stuff, and it does look like that, as computer screens are getting better (and more people grow up reading on them) that the paper advantage is narrowing and in some cases going away — although as the above study suggests paper still has the upper hand on key tasks.

  • Please Help Me Update! Places and People That Use The No Asshole Rule

     Dear Work Matters readers,

    As I am getting toward the end of our long effort to write "Scaling Up Excellence" with Huggy Rao, I am starting to do a bit of blogging and tweeting again.  As part of it, I got an interesting email from a guy named Ben about a really awful battle over verbal abuse on something called the Linux kernel mailing list — look here, bad stuff. Ben asked me an interesting question I would like your help with: Which organizations actually have "no asshole" rules?  Do they work? How do they implement them.  I haven't been thinking about this much lately as I am focused on scaling. I did update the post below in early 2012, but I wonder if folks have any suggestions for places I should add — or subtract.  It seems like something worth maintaining.  Thanks so much! 

    Bob

     

    ButtonA reporter asked me a couple years back, “The No Asshole Rule is fun to talk about, but does anyone ever actually use it?”  It turns out that there is also a lot good news out here, lots of great leaders and many civilized places that people can work.

    I wrote an initial list back then, and I update it every now and then. This is the latest, which I offer in celebration of Work Matters passing 2,000,000 pageviews and the impending publication of Good Boss, Bad Boss in paperback.

    This list is far from exhaustive, but check out the breadth of places and the different ways that the rule is used.  And if you work in a company that has the rule, that uses it well or has tried to implement it, but with limited success, I would love to hear about. 

    Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway   As Buffett's right-hand man and long-time Berkshire Hathaway Vice-Chairman Charlie Munger puts it in Snowball "We had the no asshole rule very early. Our basic rule is that we don't deal with assholes."  Check out this post for more details and thoughts

    SPM Communications. Principal Suzanne Miller won a national contest for women-owned business, in part because her company applies the no-jerk rule to both employees and customers. As the Dallas Morning News reported:

    “It struck a chord with the judges and audience,” she said. “Everyone has worked somewhere crappy."   

    Ms. Miller described the contest as “American Idol for businesswomen.” About 900 applicants from around the country were whittled down to 20 finalists who assembled in Phoenix to present their cases before an audience and a panel of judges.

    “Part of the competition was to give a three-minute elevator speech on how we’re different and why we’ll reach the mark,” Ms. Miller said. Like the TV talent show, the contestants ran through a rehearsal, got ripped apart by coaches and then performed for real the next day. Ms. Miller basically got her spiel down to nine words: "Life is too short to work with mean people."

    2tor: This online education company is serious about the rule; the media toned things down, but the use the A-word in their materials:

    The company is proud of its hard-working, but fun culture and hires based on both job qualifications and character. The company handbook says, "when you're hiring someone, don't trade off competence for character — we need people with both." The quotation comes under a heading in the handbook that could be paraphrased as "No Jerks Allowed."

    Robert W. Baird.  This financial services firm was first  #39 on Fortune's 2008 Best Places to Work list.  Now, they are up to #11. Fortune asked in 2008 "What makes it so great?" And they answered 'They tout "the no asshole rule" at this financial services firm; candidates are interviewed extensively, even by assistants who will be working for them." Since I first learned about Baird, I have spoken to multiple people from the company, including CEO Paul Purcell, who enforces the rules with zest and humor.  Here are some of the details.

    Barclays Capital. They don’t use the word “asshole,” because they are, after all, a respectable financial institution! BusinessWeek reports:

    “Hotshots who alienate colleagues are told to change or leave. "We have a 'no jerk' rule around here," says Chief Operating Officer Rich Ricci.”

    IDEO: The iconic innovation has used the rule for as long as I can remember, from its founding in 1979.  And I've seem them use it in all sorts of ways during my 15 year plus involvement with the place.  As their Careers FAQ page advises (and note they are kind enough to plug this blog):

    Talented and diverse people: We hire talented design thinkers who represent many perspectives, disciplines, nationalities, and points of view. We believe a civilized workplace is a more rigorous and sustainable place to work, so we don’t hire jerks. (Please see The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and IDEO Fellow, or read his blog.) We provide ways to share knowledge and projects among our people, believing that we all work better and learn more when we freely interact and collaborate with other talented people.

    The Disbarred Lawyer. The Village Voice tells us that attorney Kenny Heller might be the most obnoxious in New York City and that the powers that be finally had enough of his antics:

    ‘After 50 years of heaping abuse on everyone within earshot and hurling accusations of conspiracies, "favoritism," and "cronyism" at countless judges and lawyers, the 77-year-old Heller has earned this distinction: No other lawyer in the city but Heller, according to records of his disciplinary hearing, has been ousted for "obstructive and offensive behavior which did not involve fraud or deception."’

    ‘Heller was disbarred for basically "being an asshole," as one adversary puts it. And in their profession, the rival adds, "that takes some doing."’

    Lloyd Gosselink and Perkins Coie.  Lawyers may earn their bad reputations at times, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how many firms espouse and enforce “no asshole rules.”  Joshua de Koning, is firm Administrator of Lloyd Gosselink Blevins Rochelle & Townsend, which is located in Austin, Texas.  He wrote me a few years back:

    “I ordered my copy of The No Asshole Rule a couple of weeks ago from Amazon.com and am enjoying it thoroughly.  The title caught my attention, not just because it's a great title, but because our firm has had the exact same rule (phrased in exactly the same way) since it's founding in 1984.”

    They are not alone.  Perkins Coie, a national law firm that with headquarters in Seattle has applied the “no jerk rule” for years, which has helped the firm to be named one of “the Top 100 Best Companies to Work for” five years in a row. See this story at Human Resources Executive Online for more about how the rule works at Perkins Coie (and other nuances of the rule).

    Sterling Foundation Management. Sterling helps wealthy individuals establish and management private foundations. CEO and co-founder Roger D. Sterling wrote me, after “stumbling” on The No Asshole Rule that:

    ‘This is a principle that I was told about early in my career as "Never do business with an Asshole," and which we have since adopted. We've applied it to both clients and employees, to greatly beneficial effect. I would reckon it of equal or greater worth than present value analysis, which I must have been taught a dozen times in the course of getting to a Ph.D. in applied economics.’

    Gold’s Gym. Joe Gold was founder of the famous gym that produced multiple body building champions, including a certain future film star and California governor named Arnold. His management philosophy was:

    “To keep it simple you run your gym like you run your house. Keep it clean and in good running order. No jerks allowed, members pay on time and if they give you any crap, throw them out. There's peace where there's order." 

    The Wine Buyer.  The belief that the no asshole rule ought to be applied to customers can be seen in many industries.  A California wine buyer explained how he applies the rule:

    “In my business, we have a rule that says that a customer can either be an arsehole (I'm English originally) or a late pay, but not both. We have reduced stress considerably by excluding some customers on this basis.”

    A related concept is “asshole taxes:” I know people in occupations ranging from plumber to management consultant who don’t “fire” asshole customers, but charge them substantially hire fees as “battle pay” for enduring the abuse.

    Bible Studies Class. This one still amazes me more than any other experience that I’ve had since publishing the book. I’ve written about it before, but no list of different places where the rule has been discussed and used would be complete without it. Psychology Professor Richard Beck wrote a post called "1 Corinthians and The No Asshole Rule." He starts out:

    'Two weeks ago it was my turn to teach my adult Bible class at church. We are going through 1 Corinthians and I was up to teach the famous Chapter 13, "Love is patient, love is kind…"

    And I thought to myself, "Richard, what are you possibly going to say in class that hasn't been said before about 1 Corinthians 13?"

    Then it hit me. I started the class by doing a book review and reading selections from Dr. Robert Sutton's new book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't.

    Beck concludes:

    'So, we reflected on all this in my Sunday School class. And after reflection on the No Asshole Rule, I read these famous words:

    "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs…"

    Basically, don't be an asshole

    Asm2_img_cecil_balmond1Arup’s “No Dickhead Rule.” Arup is one of the most renowned construction engineering firms in the world; in fact, they were recently profiled in The New Yorker (Check out this abstract for the ‘The Anti-Gravity Men”). Look at this beautiful Kinas TV building the worked in Beijing. As I wrote here, Robert Care, CEO of the Arup’s Australian and Asian operations recently wrote me that they instituted the “no dickhead rule” in his part of the firm:

    "I work for a truly wonderful professional services company that is truly extraordinary and that is doing really well in many many ways.  Three years ago I became the CEO of our Australasian operation.  It occurred to me that there was an issue (not just in the Australasian part of our operations) that needed to be dealt with. I then heard something in September 2005 that started me thinking, and then talking to my close colleagues.  They encouraged me to speak more widely in my organisation and eventually we evolved a 'no dickhead policy'. "

    I recently had an email from Care; He reports that he is now heading ARUP's operations in Europe and that he has introduced the "No Jerk Rule" as the word "Dickhead" didn't fit with local sensibilities, but the rule is pretty much the same.  

    Mozilla (which brings us the Firefox browser): Asa Dotzler a product director, leader of many efforts to spread Firefix, and a stalwart of the company and open source software movement explained to me what it isn't efficient to be an asshole at Mozilla, or in the open source world in general.  As Asa explained, the work they do requires so much cooperation with each other  and with people from outside the company (many of whom are volunteers, who do the coding or marketing Firefox out love for the product and what it represents about a participative and decentralized approach to the Internet), that acting like an asshole is rare because it is so downright dumb when you need so much mutual respect and trust to get the work done.

    Index, a Danish Nonprofit:  Their goal is to use "design to improve life."  The CEO Kigge Hvid wrote me "One of our few management mottos has from the start been, KEEP OUT THE ASSHOLES. " She went on to explain:

    The motto has lucky been used quite seldom. I guess that we for the last 5 years have used the motto 5-6 times – even though we work with thousands of people around the globe every year. When used we simply calls the asshole – meet with the asshole – and tell them to go play somewhere else. I my self have taken great pleasure in making these calls to a few powerful decision makers, on the basis of their brutal treatment of people working with INDEX.

    Former Gillette CEO Jim Kilts advises: "Never Hire a Prick" in his book. Kilts argues that one of the practices that fueled Gillette's success during the years he led the company was "Never Hire a Prick, Even a Smart One."   And, indeed, Kilts has an impressive track record, having led turnarounds at both Nabisco and Gillette.  Kilts talks about how how "pricks"  are smug self promoters and  are destructive to the organization, and him it is essential to avoid hiring them or to drive them out of a company. As he says, they can get short-term results, but they break down people and organizations over the long haul.

    6a00d83451b75569e200e54f31943e8834-800wiIan Telfe, CEO of Goldcorp in Canada, reported spending a lot of time enforcing the rule:

    There is a bestseller right now called The No Asshole Rule. It is all about: 'Don't hire any assholes.' So I spend a lot of time picking who we're going to hire. You need someone with technical qualifications, but you also have to find someone who can work with other people and respect other people.

    Garry Turdeau Womps Donald Trump with the rule in Doonesbury: You can read about it here and get to the whole cartoon. 

      
     Michael Minns Human Resources in Australia.  The have a "no dickheads policy" too, which is described in quite a bit of detail on the link, along with a metric that shows it is working" "It’s the best place I’ve ever worked at, in fact it is so good that I don’t need an alarm clock to get up in the morning".

    Crossfit Gym at Virgina Beach.  Check of this article on the "The Asshole Barrier."  This quote sums things up: 

    The waiver at CrossFit VB states, “CrossFit Virginia Beach strives to provide a positive and encouraging environment for our clients. Anyone that is disruptive or negatively influences this environment is subject to having their membership revoked. This is at the sole discretion of CrossFit Virginia Beach Management.” The word “asshole” isn’t used, but Gill says she frequently tells clients that “it’s basically an asshole clause.”

    The diversity of this list delights me. Sure, there are still too many jerks out there and too many organizations (and apparently cities) where every day feels like a walk down Asshole Avenue. But there are also a lot of smart and civilized people who are fighting back and, better yet, winning. I’d love your comments. In particular, as I said, if you have some new examples of places that talk about and apply the rule, please tell me!

    Finally, a warning, I have dealt with a number of companies over the years that espouse an no asshole rule, or want to, but are filled with assholes.  In such case, it isn't a good idea to put the no asshole rule in your corporate values, handbooks, or recruiting materials because you risk being seen as both an asshole and a hypocrite.

    P.S.  These examples focus mostly on “top down changes,” but organizational norms can also change when persistent and influential people work to set the right example and to point out – even in public – when behavior happens that demonstrates the wrong way to behave.

    A good example of this comes from a British manager who wrote me that he works in a firm that is infested with assholes, but since he read The No Asshole Rule, he and several colleagues are working to change their norms. He described one of the most effective methods as follows:

    ‘I now attend a lot of management meetings where I have started to introduce the idea of a civilized work place and that we lose available efficiency and effectiveness due to people being de-motivated. When I am now faced with negativity or an "Asshole" I have started to use a new approach of: “surely you don’t want us to breed that type of feeling in the business or listen to what you just said.”  I have found this head on approach very successful.’

  • My Main Focus for 2012: Still Scaling-Up Excellence

    I thought I would provide an update about what I am working on these days, and use it to get some ideas and advice from folks who read this blog.

    2011 was a year of learning and thinking for me, which was necessary because 2010 was simply wild.  I had open heart surgery in April, Good Boss, Bad Boss was published in September, as was the paperback version of The No Asshole Rule — both of which became New York Times bestsellers.   I spent 2011 doing a lot of talking, reading, and thinking about two future projects — they are moving along, but it is always a slow process.  I am lucky to have a job where I don't have to rush to get things out before I am proud of them.

    The first project remains in the early stages.  It follows from my focus on the intersection of humanity and performance in the workplace.  I would tell you more, but it is so ill-formed that I changed my mind about the exact focus several times last year and will likely do so several more times. The one thing I can say at this point is that, when I go back to all the stories people have told me about being a boss, working for bosses, and dealing with assholes, two themes come up over and over: 1. How crucial it is for people to feel as if they are treated with dignity and respect and  2. How important it is for people to be able to stand-up for themselves and others, to create conditions that enable dignity and respect, but to do so without being an asshole.   This first project may take years to reach fruition as my main focus now is on the second project — which fits with my other work on innovation and organizational change.

    My Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I have been reading about, talking about and studying "scaling" for several years now — the challenge of spreading and sustaining actions and mindsets across organizations and networks of people — of spreading excellence or goodness from the few to the many.  This was my primary focus last year and will continue to be in 2012.  Huggy and I are now making serious progress on a book that digs into the topic.

    Every book has a life of its own. This one took awhile to get moving, but it is now dominating our lives.  We seem to be in constant conversation with managers and executives from all kinds of industries about the topic (e.g., in recent weeks we've talked to executives from high tech firms, banks, and the hotel industry; administrators who run prisons; leaders of a big beer company; and school administrators — this week we are swimming in founders of start-ups), we are teaching a fun and somewhat crazy class with 60 MBA and engineers on scaling-up excellence this term (I will blog more about this in the coming weeks), and the text for the book is now pouring out of our computers slowly but steadily.

    Last year, HBR provided summaries of projects that a host of of business and management leaders would be taking on in 2011 — including me.  The perspective Huggy and I are developing has become more refined and our ideas are now much sharper.  But the  "agenda" piece I wrote about a year ago still captures what we are trying to do pretty well. 

    I said our goal was to finish the book in 2011. That didn't happen, but I am optimistic it will this year as we are moving along at a healthy clip. I repeat that description of our project completely (along with comments from the earlier version of this post, published here last year).  We would love any additional comments, suggestions, examples, or other ideas you have:

    My Stanford Business School colleague Hayagreeva Rao and I are absorbed by why behavior spreads—within and between organizations, across networks of people, and in the marketplace. We've been reviewing academic research and theory on everything from the psychology of influence to social movements to how and why insects and fish swarm.

    We are also doing case studies. We're documenting Mozilla's methods for spreading Firefox (its open-source web browser); the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's "100,000 Lives" campaign (an apparently successful effort to eliminate 100,000 preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals); the spread of microbrewing in the United States; an organizational change and efficiency movement within Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer); and the scaling of employee engagement at JetBlue Airways. And we're examining case studies by others, including the failure of the Segway to scale and the challenges faced by Starbucks as a result of scaling too fast and too far.

    Our goal is to write a book in 2011 that provides useful principles for managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who wants to scale constructive behavior. Because we are in the messy middle, I can't tell how the story will end. But we believe we're making progress, and we're excited about a few lines of thought.

    The first is the link between beliefs and behavior. A truism of organizational change is that if you change people's minds, their behavior will follow. Psychological research on attitude change shows this is a half-truth (albeit a useful one); there is a lot of evidence that if you get people to change their actions, their hearts and minds will follow.

    The second theme is "hot emotions and cool solutions." As Rao shows in his research on social movements, a hallmark of ideas that scale is that leaders first create "hot" emotions to fire up attention, motivation, and often righteous anger. Then they provide "cool," rational solutions for people to implement. In the 100,000 Lives campaign, for example, hot emotions were stirred up by a heart-wrenching speech at the kickoff conference. The patient-safety activist Sorrel King described how her 18-month-old daughter, Josie, had died at Johns Hopkins Hospital as the result of a series of preventable medical errors. Her speech set the stage for IHI staffers to press hospitals to implement six sets of simple, evidence-based practices that would prevent deaths.

    The third is what we call the ergonomics of scaling—the notion that when behaviors scale, it is partly because they've been made easy, with the bother of engaging in them removed. In developing Firefox in the early days, Mozilla's 15 or so employees were able to compete against monstrous Microsoft (and produce a browser with fewer bugs than Internet Explorer) by dividing up the chores and using a technology that made it easy for more than 10,000 emotionally committed volunteers to do "bug catching" in the code. Mozilla now has more than 500 employees, but it is still minuscule compared with Microsoft, and those bug catchers are still hard at work every night.

    Again, we would love to hear your ideas:  Cases we should dig into, research on scaling and organizational change we should know about, and methods you've used in your organization to scale good behavior and descale bad. We would love to hear it all.

  • Chip Conley’s Emotional Equations: A Leadership Self-help Book You Will Love (Even If You Hate Self-help Books)

    Emotional_book-500x500

    Chip Conley is an astoundingly talented human-being, and for me, the very model of a CEO who built an organization that strikes a  balance between performance and humanity, or as IDEO's David Kelley puts it, between love and money. Shortly after graduating from the Stanford Business School, at the age of 26, he started a  25 year quest to build what has become one of America's most successful boutique hotel chains, Joie de Vivre.  It is now some 40 hotels strong — and each property has its own personality from very first in the chain, the rock and roll themed Pheonix in San Francisco to the upscale and rugged beautiful Ventana Inn located in Big Sur, California.  

    I've been lucky enough to get to know to Chip a bit over the past year, and have been struck repeatedly with his rare blend of emotionally sensitivity, business acumen, creativity, and generosity. Last week, we had Chip as a guest at the class on Scaling-Up Excellencee that Huggy Rao and I are teaching this term to business and engineering students at Stanford.  Chip's stories about the method that he uses to develop a distinct brand identity for each property grabbed everyone in the room: They start by picking the magazine that best represents the experience that they want to design for guests, and then develop five words to summarize the feelings that go with it, and then design to that image.  So, at the Phoenix, The Rolling Stone was the magazine they choose; for a more recent property (The Hotel Rex, I think), they choose The New Yorker.  As Chip explained, this simple early choice helps guides hundreds of decisions about everything from the target market for the hotel to the kinds of unexpected delights they offer guests. 

    Chip blends this creative capitalism with impressive compassion and caring for his staff.  I was most impressed when he reported that, after September 11 2001 when the hotel business was under siege, especially his hotels (in part, because of the French name — he got a lot hate mail), rather than shutting hotels and doing layoffs, Chip and his top team decided to take the financial hit themselves and to protect their people the best they could.  Indeed, while his top team top a huge cut, and Chip took a "salary sabbatical" for three years, not a single person was laid-off for lack of work.  Now that is having people's backs!  And much like when Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith defended their people during trying times, the resulting trust, loyalty, and psychologically safety has fueled the growth and spirit of the company.  Chip is still heavily involved in chain, opening new properties and he still has a financial stake, but he sold a majority share of the company a couple years back and is now focused on writing wonderful books and speaking (he is one of the best speakers I've ever seen, if you get a chance, go and see him).  Indeed, Chip started cranking out books when he was still CEO (a tough thing to do). with his most notable past book being Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow.

    The main reason I am writing this post is to point you to his new book, Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success. I am not sure I have ever seen a book quite like this, as I could not decide if it was business book or a self-help book when I started reading it. Ultimately, I realized it is both, and for Chip, dealing with and channelling his emotions is the key to his success as a leader and mentor and crucial to whether he travels through his days feeling or bad about himself. 

    Chip makes a mighty strong case — using stories, dabs of research, and the lovely simply equations that fill the book — to argue there are general principles that we can apply to ourselves and others to be better leaders and humans.   Chip sees himself as "your emotional concierge" and the book as an "operating manual for being a super human being." He doesn't mean becoming superhuman, to him, that is a dangerous goal; rather, he means not allowing your emotions to get the best of you and instead finding ways  "your emotions can represent the best in you."

    Chip then presents a series of simply emotional equations and associated stories and advice, things like

    Despair = Suffering – meaning

    Happiness = Wanting What You Have/Having What You Want

    Regret = Disappointment + Responsibility (think about that one)

    Authenticity = Self-Awareness x Courage

    Wisdom = The Square Root of Experience

    I know, it seems silly on the surface.  I frankly hesitated to read the book because I hate self-help books (being a psychology major for 10 years has made me cynical about them).  Despite that, I just couldn't resist once I started reading the thing.  The way that Chip frames these formulas, links them to the daily struggles every leader –  and every other person — faces as they try to navigate through life, is done in such a compelling and helpful way that the result is the kind of read  (and a weird from of useful therapy) that simply doesn't exist in any book I know.  I am not the only one who is enjoying this book — it is already on The New York Times bestseller list.

    In the name of full disclosure, I did grow-up in California and I am a big fan of Chip's; but anyone who knows me will tell you I am the least "new age' guy you will ever meet.  So you might be as surprised as I was by how instructive and comforting it was to read Chip's delightful and quirky book.

    P.S. If you want a fun and quite accurate summary of the book's main idea, check out this "book trailer."

  • More Evidence that Exposure to Economic Theory Breeds Greed

    I have written here and elsewhere — including in academic journals with Fabrizio Ferraro and Jeff Pfeffer — about research and theory suggesting that, when people are exposed to economic theory and assumptions, they tend to become more selfish.  This research, as with much evidence in the behavioral science, shows that exposure to ideas or even little "primes" (such as one study that simply exposed students to backpack versus a briefcase) can have surprisingly big effects on whether people are selfish or generous.  In this vein, an article in the December 2011 edition of the Academy of Management Learning & Education journal by Long Wang, Deepak Malhotra, and Keith Murnighan reports three studies that add to this troubling pile of evidence:

    In the first study, students played something called "The Dictator Game," where they are given complete control over how ten dollars were distributed between themselves and a counterpart in another room.   The researchers found that students who studied economics were significantly more greedy than those who studied education, with the average economics student taking about a $1.25 more for him or herself (($7.76 vs. $6.50). 

    A second study compared the attitudes of students who had taken two or fewer economics courses to those who had taken three or more classes, and found that those students who had taken more economics classes had more positive views of their own greedy behavior and of morality of greed in general.

    A third study compared students who were simply exposed to short statements from economists about the virtues of self-interested behavior versus statements from economists about the negative effects of self-interest.  Then they were given a questionnaire with five statements about the benefits of greed. The researchers found that simply being exposed to these short arguments packed a wallop:  People who read about the benefits of self-interest (although randomly assigned to the condition) were more likely portray greed as good, correct, and moral.

    Taken together, these studies, along with a pile of research before them, suggests the assumptions we are exposed to in life — and those we are attracted to as well — can have a big impact on how we view and treat others.  They don't show that economics is inherently evil, but do suggest that embracing (or just being exposed to) one of the core assumptions in the field — that people are inherently self-interested — can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, which can make you think and act like a more greedy person.  

    Looking out for yourself is necessary in life. We all need to money, we have others we need to take care of, and striving to do great individual work can benefit those around us in many ways.  But studies like this one  are instructive.  They remind us that being around others who are greedy and selfish can cause us to be infected with the same behaviors and beliefs, that just being around money and thinking about it can lead us to be less likely to help others (and less likely to ask for help), and that when we are feeling competitive and wanting more and more it is a good time to stop ask and ourselves: Do I have enough for myself? Do I really need more?