Work Matters

Tag: No Asshole Rule

  • An Evidence-Based Temper Tantrum Topples The Local Asshole

    About 15 years ago, UC Berkeley's Barry Staw
    and I had a running conversation about the conditions under which
    showing anger, even having a temper tantrum, is strategic versus
    something that undermines a person's reputation and influence, and for
    leaders, the performance of their teams and organizations.  In fact,
    Barry eventually collected some amazing in-the-locker room half-time
    speeches for basketball coaches that he is currently  working on writing
    and publishing. 

    I thought of those old conversations when I got
    this amazing note the other day (this is the same one that inspired me
    to do my last post on the Atilla the Manager cartoon):

    I just discovered your work via Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist. I had an
    asshole boss until I got her fired. For 6 years I was abused and I should have
    done what you say and got out as soon as I could. But you get comfortable and
    used to the abuse. You even think you are successfully managing the abusers
    behavior with your behavior. Ridiculous I know. I suffered everything you
    mentioned including depression, anxiety and just plain unhappiness. The day I
    snapped, I used the "I quit and I'm taking you down with me" tactic.
    I did document the abuse even though just like every asshole situation, everyone
    knew she was an abuser. In an impassioned meeting I let top management know
    exactly why I was quitting, let them know they are culpable for all the mental
    anquish and turnover and poor results stemming from the asshole. They probably
    thought I was a madman with nothing left to lose and about to sue and defame
    the company (they'd have been correct). Two hours later she was walked out. Now
    the department is doing great and actually producing instead of trying to
    manage the reactions of a lunatic.

    I am taken with this note for
    numerous reasons.  For starters, I am always delighted when the victim
    of an asshole finds a successful way to to fight back.  I am also
    pleased to see  that, as happens so often, once this creep was sent
    packing, people could stop spending their days trying to deal with her
    antics and instead could devote their energies to doing their jobs well.
    And in thinking about it in more detail — and thinking back to those
    old conversations with Barry — I believe that showing anger was
    effective in this situation for at least three reasons.

    1. He was right.
    This was, as the headline says, an evidence-based temper tantrum. 
    Although his superiors may have not been overly pleased with how he
    delivered the news, he apparently had darn good evidence that this
    person was an asshole and doing harm to him and his co-workers. Facts
    matter, even when emotions flare.

    2. His anger was a reflection of how others felt, not just his particular quirks and flaws. 
    This outpouring of anger and the ultimatum he gave were seen as giving
    voice to how everyone who worked with this "lunatic" felt.  It was his
    tantrum, but it was on behalf of and gave voice to others.  In such
    situations, when a person is not seen as out of touch reality or crazy,
    even though he may have felt or even acted like a "madman" for the
    moment, the anger and refusal to give in can be very powerful.  I also
    suspect that, in this case, those same bosses who fired him felt he same
    way about the local asshole, and his anger propelled them to take an
    action they knew was the right thing to do. The notion that emotions are
    contagious and propel action is quite well established in a lot of
    studies (see research by Elaine Hatfield for example). 

    3. The was a rare tantrum. 
    This follows from the last point.  If you are always ranting and
    yelling and making threats, people aren't likely to take you
    seriously.   Tantrums are effective when they are seen as a rare and
    justified outburst rather than a personal characteristic — as something
    that is more easily attributed to the bad situation the person is in
    rather than personal weakness or style.

    Please, please don't use
    this fellow's success as a reason to start yelling and making threats
    and all that.  That is what a certified asshole would do.  But — while
    such outbursts are not always the product of rational planning — this
    little episode provides instructive guidance about when expressing anger
    might produce outcomes for the greater good.  It also provides some
    interesting hints about when it is best to try to stop outbursts from
    those you are close to versus when egging them on is a reasonable thing
    to do.

    Finally, a big thanks to the anonymous writer of this note.  I learned something from it and I hope that other do as well.

    P.S. This note and post makes me think that some revision to my list of Tips for Surviving Workplace Assholes might be in order.

  • William Gibson on Assholes and the Damage Done

    William Gibson on Assholes
    William Gibson is one of the most influential and out there science fiction writers of our time.  Read about him here and here. He is credited with first usign the term "cyberspace" in a 1982 story and Wikipedia claims "He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web."   He is also credited with one of my favorite quotes "The future is already here — it is just not very evenly distrubited.

    P.S. A big thanks to Caroline for sending this to me!

  • “Ascent of the A-Word” Geoffrey Nunberg’s Great New Book

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    You have probably have heard of  Geoffrey Nunberg — that brilliant and funny linguist on NPR.  He has a brand new asshole book called Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First 60 years.  I first heard about it a few weeks back when I was contacted by George Dobbins from the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  He asked if I might moderate Nunberg's talk on August 15th, given we are now fellow asshole guys.  I was honored to accept the invitation and I hope you can join us that evening — you are in for a treat.

    The book is a satisfying blend of great scholarship, wit, and splendid logic.  It is a joy from start to finish, and the reviewers agree.  I loved the first sentence of the Booklist review “Only an asshole would say this book is offensive. Sure, it uses the A-word a lot, but this is no cheap attempt to get laughs written by a B-list stand-up comic." 

    Nunberg starts with a magnificent first chapter called The Word, which talks about the battles between "Assholes and  Anti-assholes."   I love this sentence about the current state of public discourse in America "It sometimes seems as if every corner of our public discourse is riddled with people depicting one another as assholes and treating them accordingly, whether or not they actually use the word."  As he states  later in the chapter, he doesn't have a stance for or against the word (although the very existence of the book strikes me as support for it), the aim of the book is to "explore the role that the notion of the asshole has come to play in our lives." 

    He then follows-up with one delightful chapter after another, I especially loved "The Rise of Talking Dirty,"  "The Asshole in the Mirror," and "The Allure of Assholes."  I get piles of books every year about bullies, jerks, toxic workplaces, and on and on. Although this isn't a workplace book, it is the best book I have ever read that is vaguely related to the topic. 

    I admired how deftly he treated "The Politics of Incivility" in the chapter on "The Assholism of Public Life."  Nunberg makes a compelling argument that critics on the right and the left both use the tactic of claiming that an opponent is rude, nasty, or indecent  — that they are acting like assholes and ought to apologize immediately.   Nunberg documents "the surge of patently phony indignation for all sides," be it calling out people for "conservative incivility" or "liberal hate."    He captures much of this weird and destructive game with the little joke "Mind your manners, asshole."

    I am barely scratching the surface, there is so much wisdom here, and it is all so fun.  Read the book.    Read and listen to this  little piece that Nunberg did recently on NPR.  This part is lovely:

    Well, profanity makes hypocrites of us all. But without hypocrisy, how could profanity even exist? To learn what it means to swear, a child has to both hear the words said and be told that it's wrong to say them, ideally by the same people. After all, the basic point of swearing is to demonstrate that your emotions have gotten the better of you and trumped your inhibitions

    We hope to see you at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on August 15th, it should be good fun.

  • Wired Story Wraps With My Argument That Steve Jobs Is Like A Rorschach Test

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    I can't even recall quite when it happened, but several month back a Wired reporter named Ben Austen called me about a piece he was doing on Steve Jobs' legacy.  I confess that kept the conversation short, in large part because I was just getting tired of the story — and I think everyone else is as well.  But this turned into the cover story, which — despite my lack of enthusiasm about the topic — is one of the most balanced and well-researched pieces I have seen.  At least that became my biased opinion after I saw that he plugged my last two books in the final three paragraphs!  Here is the whole piece if you want to read it and here is my argument — you can read the whole excerpt about Jobs as a Rorschach test here, where I put it in earlier post. Here is how Ben Austen ended his piece:

    As he was writing his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, felt obligated to include a chapter on “the virtues of assholes,” as he puts it, in large part because of Jobs and his reputation even then as a highly effective bully. Sutton granted in this section that intimidation can be used strategically to gain power. But in most situations, the asshole simply does not get the best results. Psychological studies show that abusive bosses reduce productivity, stifle creativity, and cause high rates of absenteeism, company theft, and turnover—25 percent of bullied employees and 20 percent of those who witness the bullying will eventually quit because of it, according to one study.

    When I asked Sutton about the divided response to Jobs’ character, he sent me an excerpt from the epilogue to the new paperback edition of his Good Boss, Bad Boss, written two months after Jobs’ death. In it he describes teaching an innovation seminar to a group of Chinese CEOs who seemed infatuated with Jobs. They began debating in high-volume Mandarin whether copying Jobs’ bad behavior would improve their ability to lead. After a half-hour break, Sutton returned to the classroom to find the CEOs still hollering at one another, many of them emphatic that Jobs succeeded because of—not in spite of—his cruel treatment of those around him.

    Sutton now thinks that Jobs was too contradictory and contentious a man, too singular a figure, to offer many usable lessons. As the tale of those Chinese CEOs demonstrates, Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”

    The point at which I really decided that the Jobs obsession was both silly and dangerous came about a month after his death.  Huggy Rao and I were doing an interview on scaling-up excellence with a local CEO who founded a very successful company — you would recognize the name of his company.  After I stopped recording the interview, this guy — who has a reputation as a caring, calm, and wickedly smart CEO — asked Huggy Rao and me if we thought he had to be an asshole like Jobs in order for his company to achieve the next level of success…. he seemed genuinely worried that his inability to be nasty to people was career limiting. 

    Ugh.  I felt rather ill and argued that it was important to be tough and do the dirty work when necessary, but treating people like dirt along way was not the path to success as a leader or a human-being.  Perhaps this is my answer to the Steve Jobs Rorschach test: I believe that Jobs succeeded largely despite rather than because of the abuse he sometimes heaped on people.  Of course, this probably tells you more about me than Jobs!

  • A Different Version of the Creation Myth

    

     

    A big thanks to Carol Murchie for sending this my way.

  • “I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole”

    The No Asshole Rule emphasizes that one of the best ways to avoid the negative effects of workplaces that will leave you feeling demeaned and de-energized is to carefully assess your boss and colleagues during the interview and recruitment process.   Guy Kawasaki and I had fun with this challenge a few years back when we developed a list of 10 signs that your future boss is likely to be a bosshole.  In this spirit, I got a remarkable note the other day from a fellow who used his job interview to determine that his future boss was likely to be an asshole. Note the often subtle signs he observed.  This are his exact words, I just removed a couple key sentences (with his permission) to protect his identity:

    Dr. Sutton,

    Just wanted to thank you.  I read your "no Asshole rule" book on the plane my way to an interview.  I suspected from our initial phone interview that he could be a jerk.  I decided to take a new approach to the interview…to see how he interacted with shop floor employees and people that worked directly for him, to see how he spoke to me, and his verbal and visual actions, to see if I wanted this position instead of trying to impress them so they want to hire me.  I watched people that worked for him stand away from him when talking to him.  I saw he never smiled, and no one smiled at him.  He passed people on the line without so much as a nod to them.  And to top it off, he cut me off TWICE when I was talking like I wasn't even speaking, and then once even rudely didn't even PRETEND to listen to me as I talked about my background. In fact, I believe he started looking around and saying "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh" rudely "rushing me along" about 15 seconds into my background discussion.  To top it off, I remember you saying "assholes hire assholes", so I asked him if he had recommended the hiring of the people on his current team, and he boldly bragged "I hire EVERYONE on my team, it is all MY decision"…so I turned down the offer.  I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole. .  And life is too short to do that again.

    I find this guy to be very astute.  What do you think of his analysis?

    What are other signs that you look for that a future boss — or colleague –is likely to be a certified asshole?

  • An Asshole Infested Workplace — And How One Guy Survived It

    Even though it has been five years since The No Asshole Rule was published in hardback, I still get 15 or 20 emails a week about issues pertinent to the book — descriptions of workplace tyrants and creeps, on how to avoid breeding them, and on what to do about them when you work with one — or a lot of them.  

    This blog would contain nothing but "asshole stories" and I would be posting a couple times a day if I reported them all. Clearly, that would be both boring and depressing.  And I am interested in other things. But every now and and then, I get one that is so well-crafted that I feel compelled to post it. I got a great one yesterday. 

    I don't want to put the whole email here both because it is so detailed and because I don't want to reveal any names. But the fellow who wrote this had quite an experience and did a great job of describing how he fought back. Here are some key excerpts (with some deletions to obscure identities):

    His note starts:

    I just finished reading The No A$$hole rule for a second time (I use $ instead of "s" just in case your email filters emails with the word "A$$hole," though I'd bet it does not. I'm just airing on the side of caution). Here is my reaction. Feel free to use my full name and any contents of this email in any of your published works. Back in 2005, I began my second job out of college working as a project manager at a marketing company. It was, and still is, a family business consisting of about 100 total employees.   Here is a snippet what I endured, for nearly 7 years, from the A$$hole Family.

    This is a partial list of behaviors in the cesspool where he worked:

    • If I was eating something, a bag of potato chips for example, the President would walk into my cubicle, stick his hands in the bag, then look at me and say, "Can I have some?"
    • Someone would walk into my cubicle and have a conversation with the person in the cube across from me…while I was on the phone!
    • A coworker of mine made a mistake on a project, so the VP of Sales sent the client an email, copying my boss, which said something to the effect of, "I just fired ____. This mistake was completely unacceptable, and please accept my apology. We don't tolerate people like that here…" Ironically enough, it was a lie; ____ was never fired, but just moved off the account.
    • The family members would routinely yell across the entire office to one another
    • I was having a meeting with a vendor in a conference room. The door was shut. The Sales Consultant walked in, sans knocking, and proceeded to say, "I need this room" and set her things on the conference table. And no, she had not reserved the conference room; reserving a conference room in this company was far-too-advanced of an idea.
    •  [A married couple] who also worked at the A$$hole company were going through a divorce. They routinely had shouting and yelling matches, followed by slamming drawers, desks, and just about anything else that could make a loud noise and disrupt everyone in the office.
    • [One family member] often spoke to me like I was a 5-year old child (she did the same to most underlings, especially the men), and always loudly enough so everyone in the surrounding area could hear that I was being thrown under the bus. She liked to make an example of her victims. Oddly enough, she apparently has a Psychology degree (No offense to you at all, Dr. Sutton).
    • [Another executive] was famous for bullying vendors, yelling at them on the phone, slamming desks and drawers, etc.. He would also do this by using his blue-tooth ear-piece and his cell phone as he walked around the office, yelling on the phone.
    • They hired another A$$hole (You wrote that A$$holes tend to hire other A$$holes). He was most lethal behind a computer, where he would send scathing emails to co-workers. However, he would not limit his exchanges to emails, as my colleague would often complain that he said things—NOT in private—like, "If you think you need a raise, then maybe you should quit and get another job."
    •  I literally witnessed my manager turn into an A$$hole overtime due to over-exposure to the A$$hole Family. In the beginning, he was an optimistic, friendly, driven, trustworthy manager. 6+ years later, he scowled and glared at co-workers; he became two-faced; I lost trust in him.

    I love this summary, it is sad but funny at the same time:

    There is such an infestation of A$$holes at this company that someone should tent the building and spray it with A$$hole insecticide. I could go on for pages about these stories. I wish I had documented more of them, because some of them were really funny.

     Then, he tells us how he too started catching the sickness — as I have written here many times, bad behavior is contagious. Thank goodness, he and his colleagues hatched exit plans:

    After working there for a year, I realized that I was turning into an A$$hole: I was losing my temper with vendors on the phone; my stress-level was getting too high to manage; and I started to send more scathing emails. It also started to affect my personal life, as I would come home from work and lose my temper with my partner for no reason. I then realized that I needed to get out. Nothing I could do would help me manage this job long-term. So, 3 of my colleagues and I all made a pact to get new jobs as quickly as possible.

    Finally, I was especially taken with his description of the things he did to cope with the infestation of assholes around him, many are consistent with my survival tips, others are new twists and turns. Here is most of his list:

    •  I confronted [a boss] about him throwing me under the bus. I explained to him that after throwing me under the bus, I become anxious, nervous, embarrassed, and I cannot concentrate, which greater increases my chances for making mistakes. My solution was to instead speak to me in private about a way that we can work together to reduce any mistakes and increase productivity for our whole department. He never threw me under the bus again (to my face, anyway), but he never took me up on the offer to speak with me about how to help improve my job performance, as well as my co-workers. 
    • Wrote in my daily journal (this was a tremendous small win; I could vent my frustrations and focus on my strategy to get out of the A$$hole Factory. I still write in my journal)
    • Using any downtime at work to apply for other jobs
    • Using the "I have a doctor's appointment" excuse to go on job interviews
    • The President/CEO ran for a political post. I voted for the other guy.
    • Working as hard as possible at my job, so that when I left, it would be difficult to replace me
    • Wear headphones to drown out the A$$holes yelling across the office at one another
    • Piled things like my briefcase and books near the entrance to my cubicle so A$$holes could not enter un-invited
    • Deleted scathing emails and never responding to them instead of responding and escalating into email World War III
    • Gave 2 weeks notice: No more, no less

    Again, I don't usually provide so much detail, but this fellow did such a brilliant job of showing what an asshole infested workplace looks and feels like, the negative effects it has on everyone in its grips, and of listing the little and big things he did to cope with it.  And, thank goodness, he realized he needed to escape and eventually got out — while protecting himself along the way. 

    I won't name him (even though he said it was OK, I think a bit of discretion is in order). But I do want to thank this anonymous reader for taking the time to write me such a long note and for doing it so well.

  • Amazon Can Say “Asshole” But You Can’t

    This isn't the first time I have written a post like this, but the experience a No Asshole Rule fan had with Amazon today reminded me of how weird their policies are around the book's title.  In short, if you write a review of the book, and you use the word "asshole, they not only reject it, they won't let you edit it or submit another review.  Over the years, at least ten people who have written submitted positive reviews have written me to complain about this problem (I suspect people who have written negative reviews have the same problem, but they don't write me). 

    I got a new one today from Bill.  There isn't much hope of changing the policy: I've tried and so has my publisher.   Bill, we will try again but will probably fail. But I do appreciate all the effort you took to write such a nice and detailed review even if Amazon won't print it.

    Also, to all readers, note Bill only used the word "Asshole" once, at the very end,when he mentioned the book's title. But that was enough for Amazon's automated screening to kill the review and freeze him out from repairing it or submitting another one!

    Here it is, and thanks again Bill!

    A crucial and enlightening read_Page_1

    By Bill SM

    Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

    This review is from: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't (Paperback)

    Through eight years of higher education, and 20-odd years in the work-force, this book is the most important, eye-opening, business self-help book I have ever read; it literally changed my way of thinking about myself as a professional, and my functioning as an employee. I have recommended it to hundreds of college students and dozens of colleagues and friends. I have lent it to and bought it for people who needed protection from JERKS in their own places of work, and I have given it as a gift to people whom I could see had the potential to become JERK bosses – as an inoculation, if you will.

    In all my years of gainful employment, I had never spent more than 3 years at any one job, picking up and leaving each time because of the JERKS (or so I thought) to whom I had to answer and with whom I had to contend. Repeatedly, I found myself saying, "I will not be associated with him/her," and then I picked up my family and moved to a new city and a new job, where I kept finding the same problems – JERKS were everywhere!

    I listened to this book on CD (a good recording by actor Kerin McCue) and then read the print version after having separated from my last place of work in the industry in which I had intended to make my entire career. Filled with anger and bitterness at having been treated poorly, bullied, and abruptly canned after seven months of my new three-year contract in my new city, Professor Sutton's book finally helped me to recognize my own role in all of this – I had never learned how to deal with JERKS, and I didn't recognize how much power I was letting them have over me (and therefore my family, as well).

    Since experiencing the revelations this book offered, I have launched a new career in a different, but related, industry, and I am once again climbing the corporate ladder in a company for which I have now been working for five years and going strong. I am much happier and more relaxed as a professional than ever before. I still have to contend with JERKS, but they do not bother me anymore. I have come to realize that their being horrible human beings has nothing to do with me, and they would be horrible to anyone else, as well, which is where I am now able to step in and offer support and perspective to others.

    I only wish this book had been written and published two years earlier! If it had, I would still be earning twice the money I am now. Nevertheless, The No Asshole Rule helped me to understand myself and my career, and laid the groundwork for my current and future success.

  • Are Incompetent and Nice Bosses Even Worse The Competent Assholes? An Excerpt from My New Chapter

    Tomorrow is the official publication day for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  It contains a new chapter called "What Great Bosses Do," which digs into some of the lessons I learned about leadership since publishing the hardback in September 2010.  I have already published excerpts from the new chapter  on power poisoning,  bad apples, and embracing the mess at Fast Company.

    As I am teaching all day tomorrow, I am publishing another here today excerpt here to mark the occasion.  It considers one of the most personally troubling lessons I've learned (or at least am on the verge of believing).  I am starting to wonder, as the headline says, if nice but incompetent bosses are even worse (at least in some ways and at certain times) than competent assholes. 

    Now, to be clear, they both suck and having to choose between the two is sort of like deciding whether to be kicked in the stomach or kicked in the head.  And I have even suggested here that there might be certain advantages to having a lousy boss (and readers came up with numerous other great reasons).  But I have seen so much damage done by lousy bosses who are really nice people in recent years that I am starting to wonder…

    Here is the excerpt from the new chapter (the 4th of 9 lessons):

    4. Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

    Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people—journalists, employees,project managers, even a few CEOs—who picked a fight with me. They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human beings; they make sure the job gets done. I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely. Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point— and thought about some lousy bosses—I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.”

    As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels. I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip up you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “Nice guys finish last” is sometimes right is that when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors, too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.

    People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires. He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important e-mails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront—let alone fire—destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

    There are two lessons here. The first is for bosses. If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide
    protective armor when things go wrong. Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well
    as second and third chances—sometimes even if you are incompetent. I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss—but care as much for others as they do for you—stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers. Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed—or things are falling apart too fast to risk it—the time has come to hit the delete button.

    Thoughts?

  • The Power of the People Around You

    I spent the morning trying to organize and make sense of various materials that Huggy Rao and I have been gathering about scaling.  I came across a most interesting post on "Learnings from 2011" that was apparently written by Xenios Thrasyvoulou, CEO of European-based start-up called Peopleperhour.com, which enables you to hire people "remotely, for small projects or a few hours a week." 

    The post was quite interesting, well-crafted and introspective.  But the advice at the end stopped me in my tracks:

    “Life is too short to waste it with people who don’t get it, whatever “it” may be for you, so make sure you surround yourself with people who do”

    This is such good advice because human attitudes and behaviors are so infectious.  If you are surrounded with a bunch of smart, graceful, caring, and action-oriented people, all that goodness will rub-off on you; and if you are surrounded with a bunch of people with the opposite attributes, that will infect you too.  This is why who you choose to hang out with, hire, fire, spend time with, and avoid has so much influence on everything from acting like an asshole, to building a creative organization, to scaling-ip excellence, to living a happy life. 

    Yet, implementing this philosophy in real life isn't easy.  I would love to hear some ideas about how people make it happen.