Bob Sutton

What Are Signs That Your Boss Cares About You?

My post on the power of bosses who take a moment to offer a simple "thanks" to people got me thinking about the more general question of little signs that your boss cares for you.  Certainly, as my recent HBR article shows, when a boss "has your back" that is sign that he or she cares about you.  But when I made my top 10 list, I had the distinct feeling that I was leaving out a lot of important stuff.  So I guess this is a form of open source PR.  To get the conversation started, here are are 10 signs that your boss really really cares about you, based largely on Good Boss, Bad Boss:

1. REALLY listens to what you say, doesn't just pretend.

2. Is careful to give you as much -- or even more -- credit than you deserve.

3. Sticks-up for you behind your back.

4.  Takes care not to embarrass you.

5.  Apologizes sincerely and completely when he or she does something that upsets or hurts you.

6. Goes out of his or her way to make it easier for you to mesh the challenges in your personal life with your job.

7. Is respectful of your time.

8. Takes time to learn your quirks and idiosyncrasies -- and accommodates them within in reason.

9. Goes the extra mile to make sure that you succeed at your job and keep developing skills.

10. Doesn't bullshit you about your weaknesses or screw-ups -- tells you the truth.

This is just first draft.  What should I add?  What should I remove?  Do you have any stories along these lines?   I look forward to your comments and I will revise and extend the list after hearing your ideas and comments.

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

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

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!

The No Asshole Rule Paperback is Shipping -- with "On Being the Asshole Guy"

Amazon is already shipping the paperback edition of The No Asshole Rule; the official release is September 1 but they are moving a bit ahead of schedule.  I had a lot of fun writing the new chapter called "On Being the Asshole Guy."  It considers a bunch of things that I learned from writing a book that provoked such strong and often surprising reactions. The chapter starts with this paragraph:

"I didn’t plan it.  I never wanted it.  I didn’t believe it at first.  And it still makes me squirm.  But I accept it now much as I accept being a 56-year-old balding white male:  I am the asshole guy.  Regardless of anything I ever wrote or said about management, or ever will, I am condemned to be that guy for the rest of my life."

The sections in the chapterinclude: "The Title is Useful, Powerful, and Dangerous," "Be Slow to Label Others as Assholes, But Quick to Label Yourself," "Subtle,Skilled, and Strategic Assholes are Especially Insidious," "Many Leaders and Organizations Use the Rule -- and it Works," "The Book Touched a Nerve About Bad Bosses," and  "Eliminate the Negative First."

Amazon is charging less the ten bucks for it. So if you've been waiting for the paperback to buy the book, or for that special friend or enemy, the time is here. And don't forget about the ARSE -- Asshole Rating Self-Exam.  A self-test to see if you are a certified asshole (or not).  Close to 250,000 people have already completed it.

P.S. Amazon has the old cover up but will be fixing that soon.

"Forgive and Remember" is Most Read at HBR

I am continuing to march through my list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe over at HBR as we get close to the official release of Good Boss, Bad Boss. My last post -- #8 on the list -- digs into a familiar theme for readers of this blog and my books, "Forgive and Remember" It is currently #1 on HBR's "Most Read" list.  Here is how it opens:

I have authored or co-authored five books for managerial audiences in the past decade. If you want to save yourself the trouble of reading all of them, and just want to know the one idea that I believe to be most important, this is it: Failure is inevitable, so the key to success is to be good at learning from it. The ability to capitalize on hard-won experience is a hallmark of the greatest organizations — the ones that are most adept at turning knowledge into action, that are best at developing and implementing creative ideas, that engage in evidence-based (rather than faith- or fear-based) management, and that are populated with the best bosses.

I'd love to hear any reactions or arguments you might have -- there are already 16 comments and a good conversation over at HBR so you might want to check that out.

New Good Boss, Bad Boss Video Interview on Stanford GSB Site

Paul Reist, Mehrdad Azim, Patrick Keating and Daphne Chang teamed-up to produce a new Good Boss,Bad Boss interview for the Stanford Graduate School of Business site.  I was most impressed with their commitment to quality, and it was fun to do because Paul asked great questions and Mehrdad did some cool video stuff where he filmed it outside and used a low camera angle.  This video and my recent AlwaysOn keynote provide a pretty good summary of the main ideas in the book.

My Favorite Books For Bosses

Good Boss, Bad Boss is officially appearing on September 7th, but it is already beginning to appear in stores and I notice that Amazon is already selling it and will start mailing out copies next week.  In thinking about the process of writing the book, and more broadly, about the the set of books that I believe every boss should read, I came up with a list of my favorites.  I tried to limit it to a dozen, but couldn't bring myself to delete any of these, so here is my list of 16:

Joker One, Donovan Campbell

Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Gordon MacKenzie

Narcissistic Leaders, by Michael Maccoby

Up the Organization, by Robert Townsend

Rivethead, by Ben Hamper

Personal History, Katherine Graham,

The Pixar Touch, by David Price

1776, by David McCullough

Peter Principle, by Laurence Petter and Raymond Hull

Influence, by Robert Cialdini

Power, by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath 

Collaboration, by Morten Hansen

Men and Women of the Corporation, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Managing Leadership, by Jim Stroup

Notes on Directing, by Frank Hauser and Russell Reich

Leading Teams, by J. Richard Hackman 

I am sure I missed a lot of great ones. Which ones would you add?

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. 

The Root Cause of Mark Hurd's Demise

Given all those lawyers and the confidentiality agreements that have been signed, we will likely never know exactly what happened between Hurd and that very attractive actress, Jessica Jodie Fisher. But from both what had been said, and not said, it seems that Mark Hurd's demise can be explained by an old Yiddish expression that, roughly translated, means "When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground."

I don't know the Yiddish words, but it sure seems apt here.

P.S. There is an interesting if small literature on "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid;" I suspect that Mr. Hurd's name will begin to appear in it; there is a lot written about Bill Clinton in it, as you might expect.

Video and PowerPoints for Good Boss, Bad Boss Keynote at AlwaysOn

Last week, I gave a keynote speech on Good Boss, Bad Boss at the AlwaysOn Conference at Stanford.  The folks at AlwaysOn videotaped the speech (and use a nice technology where you can follow the Powerpoints as well). You can find a short story by Andrew Bellay and a link to the video and Powerpoint slides here.  It was one of those speeches that was interesting because the audience seemed to start-out a bit disengaged but as time went on, I could feel them get into it.  (Alas, I have had the opposite experience plenty of times).

P.S. I am introduced by the energetic and very smart Tina Seelig, who among other things things, is the Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and author of What I Wish I Knew When I was 20 -- a great book that sold well here but is REALLY HOT in Japan.  I think it reached number #1 on the bestseller lists there.  Now, when I introduce Tina, I get to say, "She is Big in Japan."

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!

David Packard" “More organizations die of indigestion than starvation”

My last post made me nostalgic for the old HP. Those of us who are faculty members in the Stanford School of Engineering have a special place in our hearts for the company that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started.  They were students here and started the company with $500 borrowed from Fred Terman, who was dean of the school for many years.  They also donated very generously to the school; a building is named after Bill, another after Dave, and a third after Fred Terman -- all built with HP riches.  I also have been influenced by the old HP's values, which helped shape my belief that a good company or boss ought to be judged on both performance and humanity -- indeed, that is is exactly how I define a good boss in my new book.

I have blogged about it before, but it is a good time to revisit David Packard's wisdom.  His quote in the title is wonderful. The worst managers and companies often seem to be doing too many things, making things too complicated for insiders and outsiders, and suffering from scattered attention rather than a sharp focus on what matters most.  If you think about Apple, a big part of their brilliance is how few things they do -- they have a remarkably small product line for such a big company, for example.

I especially love Dave's 11 Simple Rules, which he first presented at a company meeting in 1958 but are just as valid now as they were then.  Here are the first five:

1. Think first of the other fellow. This is THE foundation — the first requisite — for getting along with others. And it is the one truly difficult accomplishment you must make. Gaining this, the rest will be "a breeze."

2. Build up the other person's sense of importance. When we make the other person seem less important, we frustrate one of his deepest urges. Allow him to feel equality or superiority, and we can easily get along with him.

3. Respect the other man's personality rights. Respect as something sacred the other fellow's right to be different from you. No two personalities are ever molded by precisely the same forces.

4. Give sincere appreciation. If we think someone has done a thing well, we should never hesitate to let him know it. WARNING: This does not mean promiscuous use of obvious flattery. Flattery with most intelligent people gets exactly the reaction it deserves — contempt for the egotistical "phony" who stoops to it.

5. Eliminate the negative. Criticism seldom does what its user intends, for it invariably causes resentment. The tiniest bit of disapproval can sometimes cause a resentment which will rankle — to your disadvantage — for years.

Looking at these rules and the others on Dave's list, my gut reaction is that gurus who say we need to "reinvent management" are wrong or at least greatly exaggerating things. Perhaps what we need to do instead is to go back to the future.  It strikes me that all we need to really do is to include women in Dave's vision and then implement such ancient truths in our modern workplaces.  The evidence I know suggests that we would all be better for it, in terms of both performance and humanity.

Shooting The Messenger: A Disconcerting Story About Carly Fiorina

I generally try to stay apolitical here.    I think that taking sides in elections and political issues when my focus is on management and organizational life can ignite ideological reactions that polarize people and make it hard from them to talk about the merits of management ideas and evidence.  In the case of the upcoming California election, I generally won't take sides here and in fact, for the Governor's race, I find both candidates so unattractive, that I really can't decide who to vote for (Indeed, governing the state is an impossible chore, so perhaps it does not matter).  But it will be very difficult for me to vote for Carly Fiorina (who is running for U.S. Senator against Barbara Boxer).  Besides the clear public record of her missteps and narcissistic actions at HP (see the Fortune article that was the final blow before she was fired), I had a lot of contact with HP executives during her reign and have since had a fair amount of contact with former HP executives who worked closely with her.  And what I have learned is not encouraging, at least given my ideas about the things that effective leaders do. 

In particular, as I discuss in several of my books, including Good Boss, Bad Boss, a hallmark of bad bosses is that they "shoot the messengers" who deliver bad news. This is exactly what one fairly senior HP executive experienced when he delivered some alarming news to Carly.  I first heard about it the day it happened, as I had dinner with with the executive that night.  He was very upset as he felt that Carly was blaming him for the bad news that he was delivering about customers' low opinion of Compaq products -- the company that HP was in the process of merging with.  As Hard Facts reports on page 160:

Hewlett-Packard (HP) insiders told us they were flabbergasted to discover that HP had done no research on how consumers viewed Compaq products until months after HP CEO Carly Fiorina announced that the two firms intended to merge. Fiorina was unhappy to hear that consumers viewed many Compaq products as among the worst in the marketplace and saw most HP products as far superior to Compaq’s products. But this information was only considered long after HP’s top management and board were committed to the merger and after Fiorina had told her top management team that she didn’t want to hear any dissent over the merger plans.

Mergers unfold in strange ways and perhaps it was not possible to perform the due diligence about products earlier (although I am skeptical about that) but the disturbing part about this executive's story was that, following the long-standing tradition at HP that facing the facts and using them to make decisions was expected of everyone, even when the facts aren't pretty, he was was hurt and a bit dumbfounded for getting "beat-up" simply because he was reporting the findings from some careful research.  Perhaps this story is not representative of Carly's behavior or, if it is, perhaps she changed her ways.  But regardless, it provides a cautionary tale about how NOT to react to bad news for any boss.