Work Matters

Tag: The No Asshole Rule

  • Kurt Vonnegut, Joe Heller, and a Great Thanksgiving Message

    Vonnegut Postcard

    It is Thanksgiving morning here in California and I was thinking of all the good things in my life I have to be thankful for, just as I know that so many of you are thinking today.  I thought it would be nice to reprint a story and poem I first posted on this blog over five years ago, on the day The No Asshole Rule was published and it was updated shortly after on the day Vonnegut died.  The key part is Vonnegut's Joe Heller poem, one of the last things he published before he died.  His message that reminding ourselves how much we have (rather than how much we want), that so many of us "have enough," is timeless and especially fitting for the day.  Enjoy and have a happy Thanksgiving.

     I just heard that Kurt Vonnegut died. I loved his books and was touched by his sweet contribution, for creating the best moment I had when writing the book. His death makes me sad to think about, but his life brings me joy. All of us die in the end, it is the living that counts — and Vonnegut touched so many people. Here is my story.

    The process of writing The No Asshole Rule entailed many fun twists and turns.  But the very best thing happened when I wrote for permission to reprint a Kurt Vonnegut poem called "Joe Heller," which was published in The New Yorker.  I was hoping that Vonnegut would give me permission to print it in the book, both because I love the poem (more on that later), and Vonnegut is one my heroes.  His books including Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions had a huge effect on me when I was a teenager– both the ideas and the writing style.

    I wrote some anonymous New Yorker address to ask permission to reprint the poem, and to my amazement, I received this personal reply from Vonnegut about two weeks later. Take a look at the two sides of the postcard, it not only is in Vonnegut's handwriting and gives me permission to use it "however you please without compensation or further notice to me," the entire thing is designed by Vonnegut (and I suspect his wife helped, as she is a designer).  "Life is No Way to Treat an Animal" is one of the famous sayings from his character Kilgore Trout — even the stamp is custom.  It is one of my favorite things.

    The poem fits well in my chapter on how to avoid catching asshole poisoning.  Here is how I set it up in the book:

    'If you read or watch TV programs about
    business or sports, you often see the world framed as place where everyone
    wants “more more more” for “me me me,” every minute in every way.
    The old bumper sticker sums it up: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” The
    potent but usually unstated message is that we are all trapped in a life-long
    contest where people can never get enough money, prestige, victories, cool
    stuff, beauty, or sex – and that we do want and should want more goodies than
    everyone else.

    This attitude fuels a quest for constant
    improvement that has a big upside, leading to everything from more beautiful
    athletic and artistic performances, to more elegant and functional products, to
    better surgical procedures and medicines, to more effective and humane
    organizations. Yet when taken too far,
    this blend of constant dissatisfaction, unquenchable desires, and overbearing
    competitiveness can damage your mental health. It can lead you to treat those “below” you as inferior creatures who are
    worthy of your disdain and people "above" you who have more stuff and status as
    objects of envy and jealousy.

    Again, a bit of framing can help. Tell yourself, “I have enough.” Certainly,
    some people need more than they have, as many people on earth still need a safe
    place to live, enough good food to eat, and other necessities. But too many of
    us are never satisfied and feel constantly slighted, even though – by objective
    standards – we have all we need to live a good life. I got this idea from a lovely little poem
    that Kurt Vonnegut published in The New
    Yorker     called “Joe Heller,” which was about the author of the renowned
    World War II novel Catch 22. As you can see, the poem describes a party
    that Heller and Vonnegut attended at a billionaire’s house. Heller remarks to Vonnegut that he has
    something that the billionaire can never have, "The knowledge that I've
    got enough." These wise words
    provide a frame that can help you be at peace with yourself and to treat those
    around you with affection and respect:

    Joe Heller  

    True story, Word of Honor:
    Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
    now dead,
    and I were at a party given by a billionaire
    on Shelter Island.

    I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
    to know that our host only yesterday
    may have made more money
    than your novel 'Catch-22'
    has earned in its entire history?"
    And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
    And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
    And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
    Not bad! Rest in peace!"

    –Kurt Vonnegut

    The New Yorker,
    May 16th, 2005

    (Reprinted with Kurt Vonnegut’s permission — see the above postcard!)

    P.S. I also added another post about Vonnegut after this one that was good fun, which talked about my favorite quote.

    P.P.S. The first version of this post was written on February 22nd, the day The No Asshole Rule was published.  I then updated in mid-April of 2007, after I heard that Vonnegut had died.  This is the third update because it seems like such a  great Thanksgiving message.

  • The Marketoonist on Attila the Manager

    121119.attila marketoonist

    I got a note from a manager about this cartoon and story at the Marketoonist, which is drawn and written by Tim Fishburne — he talks about The No Asshole Rule and the problem of brillant jerks. Check out his site, it is filled with great stuff — like this cartoon and story about my least-favorite U.S. company, United Airlines.

    P.S. I am sorry I have not been blogging much, I am hoping to turn up the volume and have a lot of things to write about, especially Matt May's new book The Laws of Subtraction.  But life keeps getting in the way!

  • Hostile and Entertaining Amazon Review for The No Asshole Rule

    0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
    1.0 out of 5 stars Typical attention seeking baby boomer, October 15, 2011

    Yet another selfish baby boomer sinks basic civility to get our attention. I think we have heard enough from the generation that thinks behaving like a petulant adolescent is a virtue. If he can't take the time to address us like adults, or articulate exactly what he means by 'a**hole' what's the sense in taking advice from him?
    ..and now that he has grabbed our attention, what do we get? fluff. Another article padded into a book, which plenty of examples of unpleasant people at work but little substance how to deal with them, or the unpleasant fact that it's often effective form of management- think of the marines for example and toughening up of mama's boys.

    Of course with the baby boom generation it's all about me me me and my feelings. Spare me.

    The above review just appeared on Amazon.  Sorry, the screen shot didn't work (at least for me)  but so I had to do cut and paste, you can see the original here.

    When I first started writing books, I would take every negative Amazon review personally.  And I confess that when they are careful, thoughtful, and negative, they still sting.  But I have learned to enjoy, even relish, the outrageous ones.  This one certainly qualifies.  I plead guilty to being a baby boomer and to selecting — really insisting on — The No Asshole Rule title.   My favorite line in the review is "toughening up the mama's boys."   Great stuff.

    P.S. It is a good time to buy this book for mama's boys.  Apparently, Amazon bought a bunch from the now-defunct Border's and you can get the No Asshole Rule paperback there for six bucks.  These bargain books produce a much lower royalty rate to authors, but are a great deal for readers.  I don't know how many they have; there was a bargain version of Good Boss, Bad Boss last week, but it sold out.  

  • The No Asshole Rule: A Useful Book Even For People Who Don’t Read It?

    This September, I will be publishing a new book called Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to be the best… and learn from the worst, which I will introduce here in some detail here very soon (It was just posted on Amazon and can be pre-ordered; but I am going to wait a few days before writing about in part because they have a few things to fix on the page with both the image and the text). I also have a paperback version of The No Asshole Rule that will be published at the same time, which includes a new chapter, an Epilogue, called "On Being that Asshole Guy."  The paperback isn't even available for pre-order yet.  And  I will talk more about the new chapter as we get closer to launch and it is available to order.  But I can say that I had a huge amount of fun writing the new chapter and got into it so much that neither I nor my editor could quite believe it. 

    When I began the chapter, our agreement was that it run a short 3000 words. Yet once I started digging through the highlights and thinking of all I had learned from being the asshole guy, I realized that there was no way that 3000 words was enough and my editor agreed when he saw the first draft. So the new chapter will be about 7500 words — I think the first draft was in the 10,000 word range.  I started by re-reading the emails people sent me — I dug up about 3000.  I was simply astounded by the range, quantity, and especially the quality. I went back and re-read all the pertinent blog posts here, and more generally used it as an opportunity to think about what I learned from one of the weirdest and most enlightening experiences of my professional life.

    One of the many odd things that struck me as I reflected on the experience was that I had written a book that many people claimed was remarkably useful, even though they hadn't read it. As an author, I confess that this insight still disturbs me both because I worked so hard on every sentence in the book and, well, I want people to spend the money to buy my book.  Here is what I said about this insight in the new chapter (note that a word here and there might be different in the final version):

    I
    believe the title struck such a nerve is because, for most people, the A-word
    captures the emotional and tangible elements of working with, managing, and
    being these destructive characters so well — indeed, people who haven’t read a
    page make remarkably accurate guesses about the contents.  This is
    disconcerting because, after all, I devoted a big hunk of my life to
    researching, writing, and editing these words.   Mark Twain defined a
    “classic” as “a book which people praise and don't read.”  The No Asshole
    Rule     isn’t a classic, but takes Twain’s point further by being a book that
    people can understand pretty well without reading.   There are other
    reasons the book is useful to those who don’t read it. An attorney explained
    that although she had not read it yet, she displayed a copy prominently in her
    office – and pointed to it when one of her colleagues started turning nasty. 
    An executive from a large internet company told me a similar story
    recently.  He claimed to have read it and liked it, but said it was most
    useful as a protective device.  People saw it on his desk, which reminded
    them to be civil, and “When they do lose it, I hold it up in front of my face
    like a shield – they get the message and turn it down immediately.”

    I also know leaders who haven't read the book, but still use it to help enforce the rule. The leaders of several professional
    services firms discussed the book with me and explained they use the rule to
    help set their partners’ salaries – especially to justify paying less to top
    earners who are all-star assholes. At one firm, the lead partner waved the book
    around as he announced the rule would be used in compensation decisions.     A
    couple years later, he told me it was working so well that he really ought to
    read it!  Copies of the book have also been used as symbolic weapons
    against asshole bosses.  In 2008, I gave a talk on the Stanford campus to
    several hundred leaders of nonprofit organization    s. Afterwards, a
    vice-president from one non-profit pulled me aside and told me how they finally
    got their abusive CEO sacked.  The senior team (sans CEO) met with the
    board of directors, gave them each a copy of the book, and all threatened to
    resign if the CEO was not removed immediately.  The board voted to fire
    the CEO later that day.

    I still think this is pretty weird, but I have accepted it as just one more twist in The No Asshole Rule story.  If you have any other ideas or stories about how the book can be used to good — or I suppose bad — effect even by people who don't read or buy it, I would be most curious to hear.

  • The Polish Translation of The No Asshole Rule is Out: What Does This Cover Say?

    Polish No Asshole Rule

  • One Answer to the Question:””What’s the Worst Advice You Advice You Ever Received?”


    An editor at Psychology Today, where I am now blogging, wrote and asked for some ideas her might use in the print edition. His question was "What's the worst advice you've ever received (Or just some really bad advice …).       I wrote him that I had received — and given — so much bad advice, that I couldn't pick a "worst," but told this story. 

    Here
    is one — with two pieces of bad advice. 
    When I was working on marketing my last book,     The No Asshole Rule, I first had a publisher offer me a contract,
    but they insisted that I had to change the title — in part — because people
    wouldn't buy a book with that mild obscenity in the title.      I told them that I wouldn't consider an offer
    unless they went with the title and walked. 
    Then, as I was working on marketing the book in the months prior to
    publication a fellow with more than 25 years experience in the book industry
    insisted that I was nuts to send copies of the book to perhaps 100 bloggers
    (most of whom I knew because I am a blogger too) and to see if they might write
    something about the book months before it was published.      He insisted that trying to sell a book before
    it was available was waste of time and effort. 
    I believe that, in addition to the ideas in the book, that the main two
    reasons that the book became a     New York
    Times     bestseller are because of the title, which no one ever seems to
    forget, even when they hate it.      The
    second reason is that the buzz on the web created a lot of Amazon pre-orders,
    which helped the book become the #1 Non-fiction bestseller for much of the
    first week it was out and one of the top 5 business books for several weeks (it
    was ultimately the #8 business book for 2007). 
    When the book first came out, the major bookstores had done modest
    pre-orders and I had only a couple of stories in the media.  The Amazon numbers (created by
    pre-publication buzz) led the major bookstores to put in big orders and led the
    media to do many stories on the book.     

    One
    of my mottos in life (which I first heard from a Stanford undergraduate years ago named Kathy) is "Don't believe everythingt hey tell you"  This is especially true if
    they add something like "I have been in the business for 25 years and I know what I am
    talking about."  As one of my former
    students, Andy Hargadon used to say in response to this line, "Do you have 25 years of
    experience, or have you experienced the same year 25 times?"

    I wonder, dear readers, what your answer to this question might be, what is the worst advice you have ever received?

  • Blame, Failure, and The No Asshole Rule

    As I emphasize on my list to left of 15 Things That I Believe, one of the best diagnostic to assess whether an organization is effective or innovative is "What Happens When Someone Makes a Mistake?" I made that this argument one way or another in every book I have every written and perhaps 50% of the speeches I have made in the past decade.  As I say in the above link (which is a story about Amazon, an organization that continually impresses me with its learning culture):

    "Failure will never be eliminated, and so the
    best we can hope for from human beings and organizations is that they
    learn from their mistakes, that rather than making the same mistakes over and
    over again, they make new and different mistakes.

    The upshot for Jeff
    Pfeffer and me is that, perhaps the single best diagnostic to see if an organization is
    innovating, learning, and capable of turning knowledge into action is “What happens when they make a mistake?”
    Stealing some ideas from research on
    medical errors, leaders and teams can “forgive and forget,” which may be temporarily comforting,
    but condemns people and systems to make the same mistakes over and over again –
    in the case of hospitals, this means you bury the dead (or close the incision)
    and don’t talk about it.  Or you can remember
    who made mistakes, chase them down, humiliate them, and thus create climate of
    fear. In such situations, the game becomes avoiding the finger of blame rather
    than surfacing, understanding, and fixing mistakes (see Harvard’s Amy
    Edmondson    ’s wonderful research on drug treatment errors for evidence on
    this point).  Or you can Forgive
    and Remember    , which is not only the title of a great book by Charles Bosk,
    it is the philosophy that the best teams and organizations use. You forgive
    because it is impossible to run an organization without making mistakes, and
    pointing fingers and holding grudges creates a climate of fear. You remember –
    and talk about the mistakes openly –so people and the system can learn. And you
    remember so that, even though you have tried to retrain people and teach them,
    if some people keep making the same mistakes over and over again, then, well,
    they need to be moved to another kind of job."

    The connection to The No Asshole Rule, however, was made clear in a most thoughtful blog post from Peter Seebach in response to the book.  I was especially taken by this paragraph about his workplace:

    I don’t think we explicitly have a “no-asshole” rule; if we do, I’ve
    not been told of it. We do, however, have a corporate culture which
    undermines the things that are essential for bullying. There’s a total
    lack of interest in blame, so far as I can tell. People certainly can,
    and do, try to figure out how something went wrong — but not for the
    purpose of assigning blame, just for the purpose of fixing it. No one
    expects that people won’t make mistakes, or yells at them for making
    mistakes. As a result, people are more comfortable than they might
    otherwise be coming forward with information about problems which were
    caused by their mistakes. Net result: Less time trying to shift blame,
    less time before the problem is fixed.

    Now that sounds like a functional workplace.. a nearly perfect example of how "forgive and remember" ought to work. And the link to rule is splendid.