Work Matters

Tag: Assholes

  • Tips: How To Be An Effective Asshole

    The post I did yesterday about the All-Star Certified Asshole, Steve Raucci, reminded me of stuff I had written on the virtues of assholes, which is the focus of Chapter 6 of The No Asshole Rule.  I thought a bit of this material might be fun and perhaps instructive for those of you who went to leave a trail of victims in your wake, while using your nasty ways to get ahead in the local pecking order.  That is what Mr. Raucci did for decades;  although please keep in  mind that he will be at least 84 years old when he gets out of prison, if he lives that long.  Here is a list from Chapter 6 of NAR (which is Jeff Pfeffer's favorite chapter in the book, although it isn't mine):

    Do You Want to Be an Effective Asshole?

    Key Lessons

     1. Expressing anger, even nastiness, can be an effective method for grabbing and keeping power.  Climb to the top of the heap by elbowing your “colleagues” out of the way by expressing anger rather than sadness, or perfecting a “general’s face” like George S. Patton.

    2. Nastiness and intimidation are especially effective for vanquishing competitors.  Follow in the footsteps of baseball legend Ty Cobb, and succeed by snarling at, bullying, putting-down, threatening, and psyching-out your opponents. 

    3. If you demean your people to motivate them, alternate it with (at least occasional) encouragement and praise.  Alternate the “carrot” and the “stick,” the contrast between the two makes your wrath seem harsher and your occasional kindnesses seem even sweeter.

    4. Create a “toxic tandem.”  If you are nasty, team up with someone who can calm people down, clean-up your mess, and who will extract favors and extra work from people because they are so grateful to the “good cop.”  If you are “too nice,” you might “rent-a-jerk,” perhaps a consultant, a manager from temporary staffing firm, or lawyer.

     5. Being all asshole, all the time, won’t work. Effective assholes have the ability to release their venom at just the right moment, and turn it off when just enough destruction or humiliation has been inflicted on their victim.

    A final reminder for readers who are dreaming of putting these principles to work.  Here is how I end Chapter 6:

    'In closing, I want to make my personal beliefs crystal clear. Even if there were no performance advantages to barring, expelling, and reforming nasty and demeaning people, I’d still want organizations to enforce no asshole rules.  This book isn’t simply meant to be an objective summary of theory and research about the ways that assholes undermine organizational effectiveness.  I wrote it because my life and the lives of the people I care about are too short and too precious to spend our days surrounded by jerks.        

    And, despite my failures in this regard, I feel obligated to avoid inflicting my “inner jerk” on others.  I wonder why so many assholes completely miss the fact that all we have on this Earth is the days of our lives, and for many of us, huge portions of our lives are spent doing our jobs, interacting with other people.  Steve Jobs is famous for saying that the “journey is the reward,” but for my tastes, as much as I admire his accomplishments, it appears that he has missed the point. We all die in the end, and despite whatever “rational” virtues assholes may enjoy, I prefer to avoid spending my days working with mean-spirited jerks and will continue to question why so many of us tolerate, justify, and glorify so much demeaning behavior from so many people.'

     

  • Fast Company Slideshow: A Boss’s Guide to Taming Your Inner Jerk

    Bosses Guide

    Kevin and the gang at Fast Company asked if they could publish a second excerpt from Good Boss, Bad Boss.  They picked my list of 11 Bosshole Busters from Chapter 8 and tuned it into a slide show. You can see it here (that's the first slide above and I like the picture they used below for one of the slides, although I would not want to be that woman).  I confess the slideshow is a lot more fun than the black and white list in the book.

      6.020214-F-4500W-002

  • A Rather Personal Interview With Gretchen Over at The Happiness Project

    The amazing Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of The Happiness Project, posted a rather personal interview about what makes me happy — and unhappy — over at her blog.  Frankly, it was one of those things were she sent me the questions, I typed out the answers without censoring myself and did not think about it again until they appeared.  I winced a little when I read it because it has a bit more personal information than I probably should have revealed, but I think it is accurate.  She calls it "Be Yourself, But Keep Your Inner Jerk In Check."  Here is where the headline came from:

    Gretchen asked:

    Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself to “Be Gretchen.”)

    I answered:

    There are three things that I say to myself:

    “Think about how others around you feel, not how you feel or what you want.” (This makes me less selfish)

    “Focus doing the best you can, not on doing better than others.”
    (This focuses me on intrinsic qualities and rewards, not social
    comparison and competition – I am much happier and nicer when I don’t
    see life as a contest… and as Dan Pink’s book Drive shows, focusing intrinsic rewards might make me creative too).


    Also, I use a variation of Be Gretchen, but because I have the capacity to be a jerk (this is certainly a reason I wrote The No Asshole Rule), I say to myself like “Be Yourself, but keep your inner jerk in check.

    You can see the rest of the interview here; I have been focusing mostly on promoting Good Boss, Bad Boss these days, but Gretchen's questions made me stop and think about what matters most. So although I might have edited out a few things if I was to do it again, it was most constructive to be forced to stop and think about more important things during this rather crazy time in my life. 

    Thanks Gretchen!  As I have written before about her book, she wrote a great self-help book for people (like me) who in theory hate those kinds of books!

  • On HP’s Mark Hurd: “Assholes Sometimes Get Their Due”

    This was the entire content of an email that I just got from a well-informed Silicon Valley insider.   As most of you know by now, the HP Board canned Mark Hurd today because of his allegedly unsavory actions surrounding a sexual harassment claim.  The contrast between this story and my nostalgic post yesterday about the good old days at Hewlett=Packard could not be more striking.

    But the events that prompted the above line are a bit more specific.  I had recently sent a draft of a blog post to several Silicon Valley insiders in which I suggested that Mark Hurd was to be applauded for his skill at turning knowledge into action during his reign as  HP CEO.  Two of the people I wrote reacted by saying that, although Hurd had done a good job of leading HP's strategy execution, as the author of The No Asshole Rule, I would be hypocritical to write a post praising him because he was known to be a certified asshole. One wrote me:

    "I have heard a lot of horrific stories about how he treats people and how people are treated by the many high level managers (called "Mini Mark's)  he has hired from the outside."

    I am lucky to have such wise people reviewing my work, but none us realized how quickly their concerns would come to light so publicly.  I thank them from saving me from embarrassment. In addition, if these rumors about the "Mini Marks" are true it sounds like a lot more needs to be done than just canning the CEO.  Hewlett-Packard (or HP as it is now called) remains a market leader and still has many great people: perhaps a new leader and top team that are adept at marrying performance and humanity can turn it into a great company once again. 

    Bill and Dave must be rolling over in their graves. 

    P.S. I got an inquiry for a journalist writing about deadline on the story.  Here is what I wrote her, which continues the themes above, and in many other places in my writings:

    Hurd was a great CEO from purely financial
    measures. But the mass layoffs and soullessness that emerged under his leadership,
    and – if true – the persistent rumors that he and other members of the
    senior team treated employees with disrespect, all reinforced the belief that,
    to make it in business these days, it is OK – or even good – to treat other
    people like dirt.   The strength of this assumption seems to be
    growing, even though some of our best US companies don’t follow that model at
    all – from IBM, to Pixar, to Google, to P&G.  Perhaps a benefit of this story and what
    follows in its wake will be a realization that, to be called a great company or
    a great leader, both performance and humanity must be evident and revered.  That is one of the main points of my new
    book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, but I believed this long before I was ever saying it
    to sell books!

  • Parking Tickets for Assholes

     AHole Parking Tickets
    I have been digging through old emails, as I had fallen behind do the press of my book deadline and other craziness, and came upon one from Jim about youparklikelikeanasshole.com.  It isn't exactly a wildly active blog, but I quite liked the "notices" or parking tickets you can download on the cite, they could come in handy.  You can see the main one above, but better copies are available at the cite.