Work Matters

Tag: INC

  • Boring = Good? Inspirational = Bad?

    LeadershipINCSutton20012

    That is the title of weird interview that just came out in INC this month, which I did with Leigh Buchanan.  And the above drawing is by Graham Roumieu. 

    Here is the story on the INC website. The title is different online than in the print version, they call it "Thoroughly Counterintuitive Approach to Leading."  

    Leigh is always fun to talk to, and after having done interviews on both The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, she has emerged as one of my favorite journalists.  For starters, she has such a sense of fun — most of us involved in doing and working with management are entirely too serious — I certainly plead guilty.  Leigh has the rare ability to talk about real ideas while at the same time conveying the absurdity of so much of organizational life .  She is also a great editor. In every interview I have done with her, I've rambled incoherently on for an hour or so, and she somehow put it in a form that made sense.

    This new interview a conglomeration of some of the stranger ideas from the various books I have written, especially Weird Ideas That Work along with some new twists.  As with weird ideas , I offer these ideas to challenge your assumptions (and my own) and to prompt us all to think.  I don't expect you to agree with them (I am not even sure I agree with all of them), but there is actually a fair amount of evidence and theory to support each of these sometimes uncomfortable ideas.

    To give you a taste,here is how the interview kicks-off:

    Leigh: You and I have been e-mailing about leadership traits, and at one point you suggested, “Good leaders know when to be boring, vague, emotionally detached, and authoritarian.” Under what circumstances might such traits be desirable? Start with boring.

    Me: There are two situations in which it’s a good idea to be boring. One is when you’re working on something but, so far, all you’ve got is bad news. Under those circumstances, any outside attention is bad.

    Don Petersen was the CEO of Ford after the Iaccoca era, and he was responsible for turning the company around. He told me a story about being invited to speak at the National Press Club. He didn’t want to do it. At the time, Ford had no good cars at all. But he and his PR chief decided he would go and give a speech about the most boring subject they could think of. At the time, that was safety. He practiced speaking in the most boring way possible, using the passive voice and long sentences. He put up charts that were hard to read, and then turned his back to the audience to talk about the charts. After that, the press lost interest in him for a while, so he could concentrate on doing the work.

    The other situation is when you’re dealing with controversy. Stanford used to have this brilliant provost, James Rosse. When Jim talked about something like the school’s Nobel Prize winners, he would be animated and exciting and charismatic. But when he had to talk about something like the lack of diversity on campus, he would ramble on for 20 minutes while looking at his feet. I thought it was brilliant

    And so it goes.  I hope you enjoy and I think Leigh for being such a delight to work with and for reminding me not to take myself so seriously.

  • Lessons from Nightmare Bosses and a Blurb for “High-Performance Teaming for Douche Bags”

    That is the title of an interview that Leigh Buchanan did with me on Good Boss, Bad Boss, which just appeared in the October INC. I have know Leigh for some years, since she was at Harvard Business Review. She is a great writer and editor.  Check out this piece she did about two entrepreneurs who spent five years building "eco adventure lodge" called Tranquilo Bay in the rain forest in Panama.   Leigh also did one of the best, and probably the funniest, interview about The No Asshole Rule, which was called "The Bully Rule Book." 

    The new interview similarly reflects Leigh's great skill at taking my disorganized babbling and making me sound coherent.  Here is a taste of the interview, two of the questions and answers:

    Is it harder for bosses whose reports range from the highest- to the lowest-level employees?

    It is harder. Because the people you oversee will have different motivations. With all due respect, this is where Jim Collins is full of shit. I have a friend whose family bought a chain of movie theaters. Maybe all that get-the-right-people-on-the-bus stuff applies to the managers of those multiplexes. But a couple levels down, you're dealing with teenagers who are going to be in the job for a year or less. My friend said there are four things you want those people to do: show up to work, look decent, not make out or get stoned while they're on the job, and not steal. If you can find people like that, you have a successful business.

    Work may be the most important thing in your value system, but that may not be true for those around you. Especially if you have all the equity, and to the people around you, it is just a job.

    Also, Leigh ended the interview with a pretty funny twist… I guess I was saying the s-word a lot during this intervew:

    So can I count on you to write a blurb for my forthcoming book, High-Performance Teaming for Douche Bags?

    Sure. I can do it now. "This is good shit."

    You can read the rest here; it provides a pretty good summary of the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss — not just the lessons from nightmare bosses:

    P.S. A couple of other media things have hit including this short interview in Newsweek, which apparently accompanies a gallery of CEOs Behaving Badly.  Also this nice review of Good Boss, Bad Boss just appeared in Risk Management.  These are also nice, but Leigh's interview is the most fun and goes into the most depth.