Work Matters

Tag: bosses

  • The Boss as Human Shield: Protect People from Your Own Worst Instincts Too

    Boring-meeting-largethumb1613679

    Over at HBR online today, one of the articles they are featuring is my piece on The Boss as Human Shield.  One point the article makes, and that I emphasize in Good Boss, Bad Boss , is that your job as a boss isn't just to protect employees from other idiots — it is also to protect them your own idiocy.  At or near the top of the list are bad meetings, too many meetings, and meetings that run too long.  The picture above of a boring meeting made me laugh and and made me think.  If the people at the meetings you run look like that, you might want to think about having fewer meetings and changing how the are done (see the example here and here of an all-hands meeting at Timbuk2 that our students at the d.school helped fix.. there were people sleeping at the meeting too before it was changed).

    Certainly, meetings are sometimes necessary, but are often ran badly.  What do you do to hold just the right number of meetings and to run them effectively? 

  • It Isn’t Just a Myth: A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way

    The approach that I take to giving advice in Good Boss, Bad Boss and in everything else I write is to try to be as evidence-based as possible.  But I also realize that the academic literature does not always map neatly onto the demands and needs of bosses and others in organizations.  So I also offer logical or theory-based advice that seems like it is likely to be supported by research — even if that research has not yet been done or I don't know about it.  Although most assertions in Good Boss, Bad Boss are grounded directly in evidence from peer reviewed studies, my arguments about the value of saying "thanks" were only indirectly grounded in research on influence, especially on the norm of reciprocity.  At least they were it wasn't until I learned of this study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from co-author Adam Grant.  Here is what I wrote at the end of Chapter 3, which focuses on wisdom:

    Wise
    bosses don’t just display empathy, compassion, and appreciation through
    dramatic and memorable gestures, as Dean Plummer did for me.  They convey
    it through tiny and seemingly trivial gestures. As we’ve seen, effective bosses
    work their magic by piling up one small win after another – and realizing that
    followers are watching their every move.   A host of renowned bosses
    talk about the importance of thanking people, about the power of this small
    gesture and how failure to express appreciation to people who are working their
    tails off is a sign of disrespect.  The late Robert Townsend, former CEO
    of Avis and author of     Up the Organization, defined “Thanks” as “A really
    neglected form of compensation.”  Max DePree, former CEO of furniture
    giant Herman Miller, described saying “thank you” as among a leader’s primary
    jobs. 

    I thought all this talk about something so small and so obvious was
    overblown until a professor from another school told me about a trip he took
    with his university president to China.  The logistics of the trip were
    difficult, as it was a traveling road show where transportation, hotel
    accommodations, meetings, and hundreds of other little details, had to be
    orchestrated.  The staff traveling with the group worked 12 to 16 hours
    day on these chores and did a magnificent job. Yet my colleague reported that,
    even though the president made many requests of the staff during the trip, he
    never once thanked them.  This lack of gratitude was demoralizing, as they
    catered to his every whim but weren’t otherwise noticed or appreciated.

    This perspective on the power of simple expressions of appreciation is bolstered by a series of four intertwined studies by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino in a paper called "A Little Thanks Goes A long Way: Explaining Why Gratitude Expressions Motivate Prosocial Behavior."  These researchers found, in each study (all are randomized experiments with control and treatment conditions), that a simple expression of thanks by someone in authority led people to be more likely to volunteer to do extra work. Their research shows that this happens because the simple act of being thanked makes be feel more valued — and in some of these studies — it also increased peoples' feelings of self-efficacy (essentially, the perception that they were making a bigger impact on the world around them).

    I was especially interested in the study with university fund raisers.  The simple act of having a boss come by and offer a public thanks to one group, and but not the other, really packed a wallop.  These fundraisers were paid a fixed salary, so Grant and Gino compared the number of phone calls made be each fundraiser before and after the "thank you" intervention.  The results were pretty impressive, as while there was no change in the average number of calls made by the group that was not offered thanks, the folks who heard a warm two sentence thank you from a boss made an average of about 50% more calls during the subsequent week.

    To return to the argument in Good Boss, Bad Boss, it appears we have some new evidence, as Robert Townsend put it, that "Thanks" is "A really neglected form of compensation." It is also a remarkably cheap form of compensation. 

  • Managing Leadership: An Unappreciated Gem

    Jim Stroup's Managing Leadership took me by surprise.  I got in the mail last week and was intending to glance at it for a few minutes, but I am now hooked.  I also felt compelled to write an Amazon review because this is a book that needs more attention.  Too many leadership books are either unrealistic, full of nonsense, or
    downright boring or useless. Jim Stroup has somehow managed to
    transcend these hazards to provide us with one of rare compelling,
    inspiring, and relentlessly useful book on the topic. I was especially
    struck with his contrasts and deep exploration of leadership from the
    rear, leadership from the rear, and leadership from within. This book has been around since 2004 and and is an
    unappreciated gem. I wish I had read it earlier, especially when I was writing Good Boss, Bad Boss,but I am glad that I did
    now. I just added it to my list of favorite boss books.

  • HBR Article on The Boss as a Human Shield: 100 Free Downloads

    Sutton_penultimate

    As I wrote yesterday, I just had an HBR article on "The Boss as Human Shield" appear, which presents some of the main points from Chapter 6 of Good Boss, Bad Boss.   HBR online posts the text of the article for free for a few weeks, so you can go here and read it now if you want.  But they also give authors 100 free PDF's.  If you would like one, please go here to get it.   Please just take one so that others can have a copy.  And if you try to get a copy and they are gone, please email me so I can let people know.

    P.S. The above picture is the opening graphic for the article; it was inspired by an executive I quote in the article who talked about how, when people mistakes, sometimes her job is to let them "hide behind my skirt."

  • The Boss as Human Shield: New HBR Article Based on Good Boss, Bad Boss

    The September Harvard Business Review includes my "The Boss as Human Shield," which presents some of the main points in Chapter 6 of Good Boss, Bad Boss.  From what I can tell, HBR puts up articles on their website for the month the issue is on the stands, but then sells them for six bucks or after that (also, they do this weird thing where they pay $100 for the article… and you get no royalties after that.. really a brilliant financial model as they are so skilled at selling their articles in so many ways).  So you can read the whole article there now and, if you like, leave a comment.  The core idea of the article — like Chapter 6 — is the best bosses lead people who construe that he or she has "got my back."  Here are the opening paragraphs of "The Boss as Human Shield:"

    William Coyne headed research and development at 3M—the company
    behind Ace bandages, Post-it notes, Scotch tape, and other
    inventions—for over a decade. Shortly after retiring, Coyne spoke to a
    group of hundreds of executives about innovation at 3M and his own
    management style. He said he’d started at 3M as a researcher and learned
    firsthand how well-meaning but nosy executives who proffer too many
    questions and suggestions can undermine creative work. So when he became
    head of R&D, he was determined to allow his teams to work for long
    stretches, unfettered by intrusions from higher-ups. Coyne understood
    his colleagues’ curiosity; if successful, an R&D project could
    generate millions in new revenue. But he limited their interference (and
    his own) because, he said, “After you plant a seed in the ground, you
    don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing.    ”

    Coyne knew that the performance of his employees—as well as his
    career and the company’s success—depended on shielding them from
    threats. This notion that management “buffers” the core work of the
    company from uncertainty and external perturbations is an old theme in
    organizational theory, going back at least to James D. Thompson’s 1967
    classic     Organizations in Action.
    The best bosses are committed to letting their workers work—whether on
    creative tasks such as inventing new products or on routine things such
    as assembling computers, making McDonald’s burgers, or flying planes.
    They take pride in being human shields, absorbing or deflecting heat
    from inside and outside the company, doing all manner of boring and
    silly tasks, and battling idiots and slights that make life harder than
    necessary on their people

    Check the rest out and let me know what you think –and what some of the other ways are that great bosses protect their people.

  • How to Tell When Your Boss Is Lying: Cool New Study

    The most recent Economist summarizes a fascinating study by two researchers over at the Stanford Business School — Professor David Larker and PhD Student Anastasia Zakolyukina — based on transcripts of American CEOs and CFOs statements during 30,000 quarterly earnings conference calls  between 2003 and 2007.  Yes, 30,000!  They linked the language that bosses used in these conference calls to whether or not the firms later "materially restated their earnings." Their paper is called "Detecting Deceptive Conversations in Conference Calls"  (here is the pdf) and they found some interesting patterns — based on research on detecting lies — that predicted apparent deception by the CEOs and CFOs:

    1. They used more general words and fewer specific words.

    2. Referred less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimize lawsuits).

    3.  Use more extreme superlatives, for example, saying "fantastic" instead of "good" (apparently in an attempt to bullshit more effectively).

    4. They use "I" less and the third person more — to distance themselves from the deception, it appears.

    5. They say "um" and "ah" less — because, the authors hypothesize, they have rehearsed their lies. 

    6.  They swear more — in fact, the Economist article starts with the famous case where Enron's Jeff Skilling called an investor an "asshole" after he challenged Skilling's positive assessment of Enron's financial conditions.

    The Economist doesn't say why the liars swore more — I would guess that it is because people who are lying are more tense and emotionally and cognitively overloaded and that inner leaks or, in Skilling's case, floods out.  In the article, the authors suggest that swearing is part of a pattern of anger that goes with lying, and that makes sense and is related.

    I have written and talked about the strategic use of swearing in the workplace.  But after the publication of this delightful study, I suspect that swearing during earnings calls will be seen as a distinctly non-strategic behavior!

  • Are You In Tune With Your People Or Living in a Fool’s Paradise? Three Diagnostic Questions for Every Boss

    The central idea in Good Boss, Bad Boss, the one that runs throughout the book and that links many things together, is the notion that the best bosses are in tune with what it feels like to work for them and deeply aware of the impact of their words and deeds on others.  And the worst bosses are out of touch and turn inward, focus on their own needs, and are oblivious to the needs of others.  As I have written in several places, including this post at Harvard Business Review and in the Financial Times early this week in an article on "Separating the Best CEOs from the Dolts",  being a boss (especially a powerful and successful one) places any human at considerable risk of living in a fool's paradise. Yet, as I also write in both places, there are also plenty of bosses out there with impressive self-awareness who find ways to avoid such "power poisoning" and the related malady of "success poisoning." 

    I was thinking about this a bit earlier in response to a set of question that Mark Fortier, my publicist for Good Boss, Bad Boss, asked me for the Q and A part of the publicity packet that he is putting together. He asked what are some of the first quick and easy steps a boss can take to evaluate whether he or she is a good or bad boss.  This question reminded me of a truly awful day long meeting I once had with senior leaders of a large company, and how the worst person in the room (and the highest status) grabbed all the talking time, constantly interrupted everyone, and as one of my academic said "Did you notice that he never asked questions?  He only made statements."   Between Mark's question and my memory of that experience, here is what I came-up with for the rest of this post.

    If you want to be a good boss, the
    big question you need to focus on is “what does it feel like to work for
    me.”   If you want to start getting some answers to this question,  bring someone in a meeting that you trust, and have them count
    three things, or even easier (although probably less accurate), evaluate
    yourself on these three questions:

    1.  How much do you talk compared to your
    followers?      This is to find out if you
    are talking too     much and listening too little.

    2. How often do you ignore, interrupt, or
    talk over people who are trying to make a point?      An occasional interruption is fine, but if
    your frequency is high it is a sign that you aren’t really listening and aren’t
    making a real effort to understand your people’s ideas and feelings.  And if you constantly run over people, it is
    a sign that you are not treating them with sufficient dignity and respect.

    3. When you speak, how often do you make
    statements versus ask questions    ? 
    Insensitive and     inner focused and unwise bosses have “strong opinions
    strongly held” and see themselves    (whether they realize it or not) as the
    smartest person in the room.  When you
    only make     statements (and do most of the talking) it is hard to learn a thing
    and you are not inviting your     followers to teach you things and challenge your
    assumptions.  Good bosses ask a lot of
    questions,     attend very carefully to both the words and the emotions they
    provoke, and change their opinions     and actions as a result.  

    Or to put it
    another way, the best bosses have and express strong opinions, but they also
    listen carefully to others, always consider that they might be wrong, and
    quickly update their opinions and actions when they realize they are
    wrong.  This approach to being a boss,
    which I describe as the attitude of wisdom in Good Boss, Bad Boss, is yet another advantage gained by bosses who
    learn to stay in tune with followers and other key people including peers,
    superiors, and customers or clients.

    P.S. Good Boss, Bad Boss is starting to roll into the stories already and will be shipping at Amazon and Barnes & Noble on September 7th or a couple days before.

  • Management, Leadership, and Mark Hurd: Why Top Teams are More Important than Individual CEOs

    My last posts here and at Harvard Business Review were about the unintended dangers of the distinction between leadership and management.  I argued that leadership is too often over-glorified and management is too often under-appreciated, which results in management being treated as a second class activity.  The discussion these posts provoked, a total of about 30 comments in total, yielded great examples and details.  I especially liked Rick's statement that "there is
    an ebb and flow in what is required, the mix of leadership (inspiration)
    and management (perspiration) which best matches the in-the-moment need
    of the entity which is being managed and led." Good stuff. This very consistent with the notion that the best bosses are in tune with others, and skilled at making the right adjustments in response. 

    I was thinking about all this when I read a fascinating editorial by Joe Nocera in The New York Times about the Mark Hurd story,  where he makes the argument that perhaps HP wanted to get rid of Hurd for other reasons, and used sex/misuse of funds scandal as an excuse. The editorial contained a lot of quotes from ex-HP executive Chuck House (an amazing guy, once given an award by David Packard for "Exceptional Defiance and Contempt Beyond the Usual Call of Engineering").   It ended with this assertion:

    What H.P. needs in its next leader, Mr. House told me, is “someone with
    Carly’s strategic sense, Mark’s operational skills, and Lew’s emotional
    intelligence.” (Lewis E. Platt preceded Ms. Fiorina as C.E.O.)

    Nocera described this as a tall order but not an impossible one.  My first reaction was, well, it is impossible, no one boss can do that.  My second reaction OH it is possible — so long as we make some different assumptions.  In Chuck's quote, and in some of the ways I was talking about connecting management to leadership, there was an implicit and I think inaccurate assumption that there are single magical leaders who can do everything.  This is called the romance of leadership, something researchers have studied a lot and I write about in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The best bosses –and the best companies, including the best boards — don't fall prey to this cognitive error and look for an all powerful and flawless CEO who can do everything. Rather they look for a boss who can build and properly lead a team with the right range and balance of skills.  Note that Carly's inability to delegate operations to others and try to do too much of it herself is one reason she lost her job.  And if Nocera is right, HP's emerging troubles with innovation and morale are things that were not being handled well enough by his team.

    The upshot of all this is that the best bosses aren't all powerful and all knowing, but by understanding their own limits and developing the wisdom to rely on others who can compensate for them, they can have a team that applies the right blend of management and leadership skills to achieve greatness.  This is one of the reasons that I emphasize wisdom so much in Good Boss, Bad Boss, which includes the ability to recognize one's weaknesses and blind spots and find ways to dampen or reverse the negative effects.  You can see this quality in some of the greatest companies of our time, at Pixar under Ed Catmull, P&G under AG Lafley, and it appears, at Apple with the blend of Steve Jobs visionary brilliance and Tim Cook's operational excellence.  Indeed, I think Job's deserves more credit than he gets for building a team that compensates for his weaknesses.

    In the case of HP, I don't think it is possible to find the one superwoman or superman that Nocera and Chuck House hope might exist.  But I do believe it is possible to find a CEO with skill and wisdom to build a team with Carly's strategic ability, Hurd's operational skill, and Lew's EQ.  As a final note, when you take this perspective on leadership as team sport — which is especially crucial in a big company — you can see why academics have become increasingly convinced that the dynamics of top teams have such strong effects on performance, probably stronger than the characteristics and actions of the CEO alone.

  • Why Leadership Can Be a Dangerous Idea

    Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a longstanding ambivalence about the distinction between leadership and management  I blogged about it today over at HBR.org, under the title ""True leaders are also managers." Here is a taste and then I will talk about what motivated me to think more about why this difference is both valid and dangerous:

    The brilliant and charming Warren Bennis has likely done more to popularize this distinction than anyone else. He wrote in Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader that
    "There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and
    both are important. To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to
    have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is
    influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The
    distinction is crucial." And in one of his most famous lines, he added,
    "Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing."

    Although this distinction is more or less correct, and is useful to a degree (see this recent interview with Randy Komisar for
    a great discussion of the distinction), it has unintended negative
    effects on how some leaders view and do their work. Some leaders now see
    their job as just coming up with big and vague ideas, and they treat
    implementing them, or even engaging in conversation and planning about
    the details of them, as mere "management" work.     Worse still, this distinction seems to be used as a reason for
    leaders to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they
    lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they
    serve. I remember hearing of a cell phone company CEO, for example, who
    never visited the stores where his phones were sold — because that was a
    management task that was beneath him — and kept pushing strategies that
    reflected a complete misunderstanding of customer experiences. (Perhaps
    he hadn't heard of how often Steve Jobs drops in at Apple stores.)

    That story is typical. "Big picture only" leaders often make
    decisions without considering the constraints that affect the cost and
    time required to implement them, and even when evidence begins mounting
    that it is impossible or unwise to implement their grand ideas, they
    often choose to push forward anyway .

    You can read the rest at HBR.org.  Here, I want to dig into some of my motivations for revisiting this topic.

    The first came a couple months back when I did a workshop for a small group of Local CEOs on Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The organizers of the workshop did advance interviews with the CEOs, and this difference came-up a lot in these conversations.  One thrust was that they were interested in how to spot managers with leadership skills and how to help good managers develop leadership skills.   My reaction, as you might expect from the above comments was that, yes, leadership skills are different, but doing and understanding management is such a crucial part of being a good leader, that they really needed to be careful not to over-glorify leadership or to treat management aS a less important skill.  A couple of the CEO's of the biggest firms really latched onto this point, lamenting that young managers often seemed to want to get straight to being leaders without learning how to manage well first, and it resulted in naive and misguided decisions — and, often, to be seen as bullshitters, or as one put it, "all hat and no cattle." 

    The second is sort of a working hypotheses that I have had at Stanford for a few years now about the difference between "Good MBAs" and "Bad MBAs."  Although my primary appointment (and tenure) at Stanford is in the engineering school,we teach a lot of MBA's at the Stanford d.school, but because we are a unit of the Stanford Engineering School (see this rant on engineering and design thinking), individual faculty have pretty much complete authority over which students get into d.school classes and which do not.  And thus far, we get a lot more applicants than we can serve from throughout Stanford. 

    Over the years, I have noticed that there is remarkable variance among MBAs, or more precisely, most seem to fall into one of two groups.  There are the "good MBAs," who have wonderful leadership qualities, great presence and great big ideas, and jump in enthusiastically when it comes to less exciting and harder chores like planning and implementing the details of user research and prototyping.  Then, there are the bad MBAs, the one's who love big ideas and always want to present the group's ideas, but avoid the hard work of planning, organizing, and implementing things — and seem especially adept at avoiding anything that entails shit work.

      I now talk pretty openly about this with MBAs, especially if they are lobbying to get into class — and a few times, after describing this difference to an MBA who was arguing to get in a class, and asking him or her to self-select, they have mysteriously disappeared.  I think this is very similar to the "all hat and no cattle problem," and bad MBAs may become those bad leaders that the group of CEOs was talking about.  (As I am an engineering professor, I don't want to let my students off too easily — yes, fewer of them are slackers and and bullshitters, but there are a larger percentage who lack interpersonal and leadership skills, but despite the stereotypes, there are plenty of engineering students who have great skills there as well.)

    The third motivation was a comment that a Silicon Valley insider made to me about Mark Hurd versus Carly Fiorina — and this was before Hurd was fired and there was any hint it was coming.  She commented that, personal style issues aside, if you put the two together, you had a complete leader because Carly was good at the big picture stuff and Hurd was good at the management stuff, that in essence, Carly was a leader without being a manager and that Hurd was a manager without being a leader.  Whether this is completely true or not (no doubt others have different opinions) it reminded me that looking for one boss who can do it all might be a fool's errand; rather, what you are looking for is a boss who can assemble a LEADERSHIP TEAM that can do leadership and management.    

    The upshot, in my view, is that asking if leadership or management is more important is like asking "what is more important, your heart or your brain?"  Both are equally essential and if there isn't a connection between the two, you are in big trouble! 

  • Why Bosses Ought to Be More Interested in What is True Than What is New

    One of my favorite CEO's of all time is A.G. Lafley,
    who recently stepped down after running Procter & Gamble for a
    decade. There are many things I admire about A.G. His modesty and
    ability to listen — and I mean really listen, not just pretend —
    impressed me when I first met him in 2000, and when I spoke with again
    last year I found him unchanged, even after all the praise he has
    received.

    But perhaps the thing I admire most about A.G. is that, in contrast
    to so many other CEOs (and management gurus and authors) he doesn't
    pretend for a second that he discovered a new way to manage, or that his
    success resulted from any mysterious and complicated methods. One of
    his catchphrases is "keep it Sesame Street simple,"
    and indeed he spent a lot of time reminding people of simple truths,
    like "the consumer is boss." He often exhorted his managers to focus on
    what happens at "two moments of truth": when the customer encounters the
    P&G product in a retail setting; and when they actually use the
    product. Hammering on such old and simple themes, A.G. brought P&G back from
    the dark period it was in when he took over in 2000. The norms and
    example he set, plus the people he developed, are still enabling P&G
    to be a great company.

    Cries for the reinvention of management and claims that we have to discard old models are
    made by every generation of gurus. But really, the ideas that work
    aren't that complicated, and most of what is called new is really the
    same old wine in relabeled bottles. If you want to read a great book on
    this point, check out Robert Eccles' and Nitin Nohria's Beyond The Hype.
    When I read it for the first time, I realized that a big reason every
    generation thinks that its solutions are new is because it thinks its challenges are
    brand new. People can't quite bring themselves to believe that managers
    of the past faced remarkably similar problems, found frustration and
    satisfaction in similar sources, and came up with similar solutions.
    Just as teenagers discover sex and can't imagine that the fundamentals
    were the same for their parents, managers are convinced they are
    encountering forces and feelings that haven't been seen before. And
    management theorists do little to disabuse them of that notion.

    To this point, some years back when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing our book on evidence-based management, I wrote Stanford's James March (arguably
    the most respected living organizational theorist) to ask him for
    examples of truly breakthrough ideas. His response was "Most claims of
    originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are
    testimonial to hubris." I promptly repurposed this into Sutton's law:
    "If you think that you have a new idea, you are wrong. Someone probably
    already had it. This idea isn't original either; I stole it from
    someone else."

    I am not denying that bosses work in different environments these
    days — the computer revolution and global nature of business have
    reshaped organizations, for example — but the fundamentals of being a
    good boss have changed a lot less than people claim. While writing Good Boss, Bad Boss I
    had occasion to compare studies conducted in every decade from 1940's
    through the 2000's, and they yielded very similar advice. Even studying
    pre-industrial people, anthropologists have concluded that the best
    leaders were competent, caring, and benevolent — and leaders who failed
    in any of these areas put their people at risk and had a hard time
    getting or keeping leadership positions. Research on the modern
    workplace, too, leads me to conclude that the best bosses strike a
    healthy balance between promoting performance and protecting their
    people's dignity and well-being. I am using different language, but it
    seems to me that what constitutes a decent boss hasn't really changed
    much in thousands of years.

    Unfortunately, the formula seems to be easier to state than to put into
    action. Another consistent finding over time is that, if you're a
    typical employee, your immediate supervisor is the most stressful part
    of your job.

    The lesson from all this is that old, proven, simple, and obvious ideas
    on how to manage may be dull — and some may be outmoded now and then —
    but they are your best hope if you want to be a good boss.

    But now, let me complicate my message just a bit, by recalling my own reaction to Jim Collins' blockbuster Good to Great (read more here).
    The hallmarks of good management and leadership Collins identified were
    consistent with much prior research — much of it more rigorous than his
    own (and he mentioned almost none of it). But there's something so
    compelling about his telling of the story, and I think that has
    everything to do with his own sense of discovery. Maybe, as with
    teenagers discovering sex, management theorists — and managers — bring
    more passion to the experience when they arrive at the basics
    themselves.

    P.S. This post represents a persistent theme in my writing, especially with Jeff Pfeffer, which I revisited and developed a bit more for the list 12 Things Good Bosses Believe that I am rolling out over at HBR, where it first appeared as What Every New Generation Of Bosses Have To Learn.  Indeed, if you look at the big business story this week, that Mark Hurd was canned by HP for behavior connected to a sexual harassment claim, I don't think that we need any newfangled theories to explain his behavior — a Yiddish expression that has been around for hundreds of year captures it all.