Bob Sutton

Escape from Corporate America: The Book and the Quiz

Ever since I wrote The No Asshole Rule, I get a lot of requests to write endorsements, or “blurbs” as they call them, for the jackets of book. This is somewhat ironic as, of the four books I wrote, only The No Asshole Rule has no blurbs, yet it is has outsold all my other books combined. And having gone through the process getting endorsements multiple times, one of the weirdest things that happens is that my editors and literary agents always tell me “They don’t matter for sales, but you have to have them anyway.” So even the people who want these things think they are suspect.

Regardless of the effect on sales, I do enjoy being asked to write blurbs. I turn down most of the requests as I only endorse books that I like a lot. Of the half-dozen book or so I’ve endorsed in the past year, perhaps the best is Pamela Skillings’ brand new Escape from Corporate America. This lovely book blends tools to help you decide if you ready to make your escape, great advice about to how to implement it, and compelling stories about people who have made the escape.  I also love the cover. 

I think the book especially resonates with me because I seem to be surrounded with so many people who have made the escape.  My wife Marina did so after 25 years at her law firm and is wildly happy in her new job as CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts. I also do a lot of teaching at the d.school with Debra Dunn and Michael Dearing, both of whom have made recent escapes – from HP and eBay in their cases. And Pam wrote this book --- her first book – because she made her own escape and it made her curious to learn more. In my blurb, I said it is the best career book I’ve read – and that is still how I feel about it.

Check out Pam’s blog as it is filled with information.  Also, as I learned from ARSE, everyone loves quizzes, so here is Pam’s quiz, which I found unusually useful

QUIZ: ARE YOU A CORPORATE CASUALTY?

From ESCAPE FROM CORPORATE AMERICA by Pamela Skillings

Do you really need this book? Are you just having a bad week or are you at the end of your rope?  Take this quiz to find out if you need to make an escape from Corporate America.

1. Rate your general job satisfaction:

a. I love what I do.

b. I have more good days than bad days.

c. It could be worse, I suppose.

d. I hate my job.

2. If you won or inherited a million dollars tomorrow, would you continue on the same career path?

a. Definitely.  I'd take a great vacation and buy a few toys, then get back to work.

b. Probably not.  With a financial cushion, I would likely take the time to explore my options.

c. Hell, no!  Are you crazy?

3. Which statement best expresses your feelings toward your job?

a. I enjoy what I do for the most part.

b. Sometimes I fantasize about quitting to do something else.

c. I am actively exploring other career options.

d. I only stay in my job for the paycheck. If money weren't an issue, I would leave.

4. What are your long-term career goals?

a. I am on a good career path, and my current job is a step along that path.

b. I feel a bit stuck and unsatisfied, but I'm not sure what I want to do instead.

c. The idea of staying on my current career path for the rest of my life gives me the cold sweats.

5. Are you pursuing your dream career?

a. Yes.

b. I'm not sure.

c. No.

6. Do you get the Sunday-night blues?

a. Not really.

b. Sometimes.

c. I get the every-night blues.

7. How do you feel at the end of an average workday?

a. Proud and happy.

b. Tired, but satisfied.

c. What was the point?

d. Miserable.

8. Where do you see yourself in five years?

a. In a bigger job at my current company or at a similar firm.

b. On a different career path within the corporate world.

c. I am actively exploring other career options.

d. I only stay in my job for the paycheck. If money weren't an issue, I would leave.

9. Do you feel energetic and positive at work?

a. Most of the time.

b. Occasionally, but not as much as I'd like.

c. Rarely or never.

10. Which of the following are among the positive aspects of your current job?  Check all that apply.

__ Interesting work.

__ Growth opportunities.

__ Great boss.

__ Pleasant co-workers.

__ Fair pay.

__ Good benefits.

__ Flexibility.

__ Fulfillment.

__ Pride in what I do.

__ A company that cares about me and/or treats me well.

11. Which of the following are among the negative aspects of your job?  Check all that apply.

__ I spend excessive amounts of time in meetings, documenting meetings, and scheduling follow-up meetings.

__ I can't remember the last time I felt truly excited about a work project.

__ I put in long hours mostly because of other people's ego trips.  This includes face time, cleaning up messes, or staying late because others screw up or delay decisions.

__ I need at least two levels of approval on any decision.

__ Knowledge and ability are less important than who I know and how well I can BS.

__ I'm not quite sure what my job accomplishes, aside from making money for shareholders and senior management.

__ I don't feel passionate about anything I do at work.  It feels like I'm putting in time for a paycheck.

__ I dread going to work most mornings and come home exhausted.

__ I don't see a future that I can get excited about.

__ I have been a victim of or a witness to bullying or blatantly unfair treatment.

Calculating Your Score:

* For questions 1-9, give yourself 3 points for every A answer, 2 points for every B answer, 1 point for every C answer, and 0 points for every D answer.

* For question 10, give yourself 1 point for every item you checked.

* For question 11, deduct 1 point for every item you checked. Deduct 2 points each for checking either of the last two items.

What Your Score Means:

28-37 You are ridiculously satisfied. Against all odds, you love your corporate job.  You might want to read on for a true appreciation of just how good you've got it.

17-27 You are on the fence.  Your corporate job is okay, but something is missing.  If your current career isn't your true calling, what is? This book can help you explore your options.

6-16  You are disgruntled.  You don't like your corporate job, but you're trying to make it work. Unfortunately, your feelings of frustration and rage may be starting to take a toll on your personal life.  Read on for some solutions.

Less than 5  You need an intervention. Stat.  Your corporate job is making you miserable.  You desperately need to read this book and figure out your escape plan.

I just took the quiz, and I scored 32. I better count my blessings. I complain about Stanford now and then and even tried to escape to UC Berkeley once. It was a most instructive failure, as I realized that the Stanford Engineering School was a much more flexible and open-minded place than the Haas Business School at Berkeley. I also learned to ignore my salary, and especially, to not use it as an indicator of my self-worth. I took a huge (about 35%) pay cut when I returned to Stanford (because business schools pay a lot more than engineering schools). I’ve always said that it was one of the best decisions I ever made and Pam’s book and quiz reinforces the point.  Also, in my exit interview, I told the Berkeley dean that one of the reasons that I was leaving the UC Berkeley was BECAUSE of the pay system. They had one of the most dysfunctional pay systems I have ever seen (it wasn't her fault, that is how the entire university operated), as it seemed to mostly reward people for going out to other schools and getting large offers -- which it often matched, or failing that, at least gave faculty big raises. As such, the smartest faculty, or at least those most motivated by money (or perhaps those who were massively underpaid) seemed to devote huge chunks of their time to looking for jobs in other places rather than devoting energy to helping their home institution. Stanford is sensitive to the market, but is much better about rewarding people for giving back to the institution and NOT rewarding people who are constantly trying to game the system with external offers. I think everyone -- including the students --win as a result.

Back to Pam's book -- I think it is going to a best-seller, at least it deserves to be one. I also think the timing is good as lots of people are being forced out of jobs and, even for those who aren't, things can be lot less fun as companies push to cut costs and salaries and to squeeze ever more of every employee.

P.S. If you buy the book and love it as much as I do, please write Pam a 5 star review on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. When a book is brand new, especially for a first-time author like Pam, those kinds of things really help.

Fold Your Arms -- You Will Try Harder and Generate More Ideas

This study is courtesy of the BPS Research Digest blog, which as I have written here before, does a lovely job of summarizing psychological research from peer review journals.  They describe an experiment which found that, when people cross their arms, they persisted twice as long when presented with anagrams that were impossible to solve, and when presented with anagrams that had multiple solutions, subjects who crossed their arms generated more solutions than subjects who kept their arms at their sides.  The researchers speculate that this happens because "over many years, the act of crossing our arms comes to be implicitly associated with perseverance, so that adopting that position activates a nonconscious desire to succeed."  The researchers also caution that folding arms can be a sign of social distance (and I would add, a sign that people are uptight or trying to dominate others). 

Next time I am in a group that is facing difficult task, I am going to suggest that we all cross our arms and see if it helps!

Venture Capitalist John Doerr: Another Fan of College Dropouts

n I put-up a post a few months back about the long list of successful Stanford dropouts, from Tiger Woods to the founders of Yahoo! and Google.  I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, and was amused to see one of the most successful VC's in the valley seems to actively seek dropouts, with an added twist. I quote:

Doerr likes to invest in "white male nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford, and they have absolutely no social life." That's why he backed Netscape, Amazon, Yahoo and Google.

I do wish Doerr would have left out the "white male" part, and in fact at least one of the founders of these companies, Jerry Yang from Yahoo! is Asian; and I would add that Kleiner Perkins, Doerr's firm, is well-ahead of other VC firms when it comes to hiring women and I understand that Doerr has been especially supportive of women in the firm with young families.

Finally, this isn't the first time I've heard a famous VC make a similar argument; I once was talking with Arthur Rock, the primary VC for both Apple and Intel, and he commented that when an entrepreneur has too nice a car or looks too perfectly groomed, he takes it as a sign that the person isn't obsessed enough with their work!

New d.School Executive Program: Do You Want to Learn How to Act Like a Design Thinker?

The Stanford d.school and Stanford Business School have joined together to offer a new executive program for people who want to immerse themselves in the design thinking process. This program, called Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation is the next logical step after the Customer-Focused Innovation class that Huggy Rao and I teach every November, which combines traditional lectures and case studies with hands-on d.school type experience – as you can see in earlier posts here, here, and here. Bootcamp is mostly hands-on. The pictures are from the hands-on experiences that we gave executives in our Customer--Focused Innovation executive program last November -- and reflect the kinds of experiences that executives get in both programs (although Bootcamp emphasizes that "doing" part nearly 100%, and Customer-focused Innovation is roughly 50% traditional case-style discussion ("clean models" we call it) and 50% hands-on stuff ("embracing the mess of innovation" we call it).

Here is the description of the new program from Kerry O'Connor, the d.school Fellow who is leading our executive education efforts (she is pictured to the left). Sounds like a lot of fun and, I can assure you, that you will learn a lot if you sign-up.

Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation offers executives the chance to learn design thinking — a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to product, service, and business design. We believe that innovation is necessary in every aspect of business, and that it can be taught. We invite you to join us at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, affectionately called "the d.school," for an experience that will enhance your ability to drive innovation in your organization.  The 3-day program will take place July 7th through the 9th, 2008.

The d.school design thinking process is user-centered and prototype-driven. As a participant in Design Thinking Boot Camp, you will be part of a small multidisciplinary team and work through a hands-on innovation challenge from start to finish. You will walk away from the workshop with a strong understanding of the key tenets of design thinking and be able to execute them at home.

Key Takeaways and Tenets of Design Thinking

• Develop Deep Consumer Insights: If you are looking for insights about your consumers that your competitors don't have, our field observations and ethnographic methods will take you beyond the limitations of      traditional market research. Our tools will help you to understand how to      tap into what is meaningful for consumers and to uncover what they need.
• Reduce Risk and Accelerate Learning Through Rapid Prototyping:      If you are responsible for launching new products and services into the marketplace, design thinking can help you to greatly reduce the risk of failure and accelerate organizational learning through an iterative process of prototyping and user testing.
• Drive Towards Innovation, Not Just Incremental Growth: Uncover and capitalize on the      unexplored innovation spaces in your business or industry.
• Empower Your Employees To Be Innovative: If you seek to unlock the creative potential of your organization, design thinking can help you to transform your organizational structure and internal processes so that your business shifts to a more innovative stance.

To learn more about the program and how to apply, look here. There is room for just 35 executives in the Boot Camp, so apply early to enhance your chance of being admitted. 

 

The ARSE Test Passes 150,000 Completions

I just got an email from Emily over at Electric Pulp indicating that the ARSE test -- the Asshole Rating Self-Exam -- recently surpassed over 150,000 completions (152, 234, with a mean of score of 6.4).  So the self-examination continues. A lot of people continue to take the test for themselves and others, as over 5000 people a month are still taking it.

I also have a number of other "ARSE Tools" out there, although none are nearly as successful as the original ARSE Test.

The next most popular is the ACHE, the Asshole Client from Hell Exam, for determining if your client is a certified asshole. This was inspired by this beleaguered fellow at a professional services firm.  We've had 12,180 completions, with a mean score of 14.3 (very high, this is out of 20, I guess there are lot of asshole clients out there, or at least people who have asshole clients are attracted to the ACHE.)

The Flying ARSE hasn't been nearly as popular, this is a self-test to determine if you are the kind of person who makes air travel miserable for everyone. A total of 7582 have completed the flying ARSE, and the mean is 3.82 out of 24, which suggests that most people see themselves as civilized passengers. But, boy, do the bad ones stand-out (I was literary knocked down by an overly aggressive passenger in Newark the other day, who decided that he had to get off the plane first the other day -- and I wasn't the only victim.)

Finally, bringing-up the rear is ARSEmail, a kind of e-card that you can send to apologize for being an asshole to co-worker or to express sympathy to the victim of a workplace asshole. The ARSE mail has always been my favorite, but perhaps that is just a rationalization because it took longer to develop than the others. But it has not exactly caught fire, as only 703 have have been sent. By the way, when Guy Kawasaki saw the ARSEmail, he predicted that it would not be very viral because it was too complicated to complete. I guess he was right, and of course, when it comes to predicting and crafting things that people will spread on the web, Guy has a mighty good track record.

I would be curious if people have any other ideas about why some of these ARSE tools have been so much more viral than others.  And if you have any ideas about other experiments that I might try with different web-based surveys and the like, let me know.  They aren't that hard to do -- at least all were pretty easy (thanks to the people at Electric Pulp) except perhaps for ARSEmail.

The Semmelweis Reflex and Why Being Right Isn’t Enough To Provoke Change

Ronny Kohavi is the General Manager of the Experimentation Platform at Microsoft, his group has developed and is spreading the use of  tools that allow people within Microsoft and external developers to do controlled experiments with users, and that way, potentially develop better and more usable software . You can read about this EXP Platform here. Clearly, Ronny is someone who cares about and understands the power of evidence-based practices, and as such, we have been exchanging emails about the work that Jeff Pfeffer and I have done on evidence-based management in our book and our website. 

Ronny is generally supportive of our approach, but has pushed me to emphasize that controlled experiments are the gold standard of science and that we should have pushed people to use them more, and included more examples. I partly agree with Ronny, as there are times when experiments aren’t used but can yield better practices – as we talk about in the book, Gary Loveman at Harrah’s did use experiments as one of the methods (along with data mining) to overturn deeply held assumptions in the gambling industry. But I argued that there are also times when an experiment wasn’t possible, for example, in the case of the now apparently aborted Microsoft/Yahoo! merger, the only decent evidence I know of that provides guidance are correlational studies, as no one has yet been allowed to do controlled experiments of the conditions under which mergers fail or succeed,

BUT I do agree completely with Ronny that we need more experiments and, as the history of medicine shows, it is important to have the strongest possible data because – even when you have it – convincing people to abandon a bad practice can be remarkably difficult when they believe in its efficacy, are skilled at, and everyone around them has always done and believed in it. We wrote about bloodletting as an example, but Ronny wrote me about an even more interesting and terrifying case:

Dear Bob,

One of the examples was the bloodletting trials by Pierre Louis, but I was reminded of a better example: Semmelweis’s Childbed Fever. The Semmelweis Reflex is the dismissing or rejecting out of hand any information, automatically, without thought, inspection, or experiment. Anyway, here’s a summary.

Ignaz Semmelweis’s Childbed Fever

The story below is mostly from the book Leadership and Self-Deception.  The story is corroborated by multiple sources including Encyclopedia Britannica, Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, and Wikipedia.

Semmelweis was a European doctor, an obstetrician, in the mid 1800s.  He worked at Vienna’s General Hospital, an important research hospital.  The mortality rate in the ward where he practiced was one in 10 – one in every ten women giving birth there died!   The reputation of Vienna General was so bad that women preferred to give birth on the street and then went to the hospital.  In the book Childbed Fever, they estimated that 2,000 women died each year from childbed fever in Vienna alone.

The collection of symptoms associated with these deaths was known as “childbed fever” or Puerperal fever.   More than half the women who contracted the disease died within days.  Patients begged to be moved to a second section of the maternity ward where the mortality rate was one in fifty – still horrific, but far better than one-in-ten in Semmelweis’s section.

Semmelweis became obsessed with the problem.   He tried to control for all factors, including birthing positions, ventilation, diet, and even the way laundry was done. The one obvious difference between the sections was that Semmelweis’s section was attended by doctors, while the other section was attended by midwives.

After a four-month leave to visit another hospital, he discovered that the death rate had fallen significantly in his section of the ward in his absence.  His inquiries led him to think about the possible significance of research done by him and the doctors on cadavers.  Yes, cadavers.  Semmelweis spent far more time doing research on cadavers than other doctors.

Vienna General was a teaching and research hospital and many doctors split their time between research on cadavers and treatment of live patients.  The doctors in his section performed autopsies each morning on women who had died the previous day, but the midwives were not required or allowed to perform such autopsies.  They hadn’t seen any problem with that practice because there was as yet no understanding of germs.

Semmelweis concluded that ‘particles’ from cadavers and other diseased patients were being transmitted to healthy patients on the hands of the physicians.  He experimented with various cleansing agents and instituted a policy requiring physicians to wash their hands thoroughly in a chlorine and lime solution before examining any patient.  The death rate fell to one in a hundred!

What is surprising about this story isn’t the discovery through attempts to control for factors, which led to the unthinkable conclusion (at the time) that there was something invisible that was transferred by the doctors.   What is really shocking is how long it took the community of doctors to accept the results.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the mortality rate in Semmelweis’s division fell from 18.27% to 1.27% in 1848.  That was not enough to generate sufficient recognition and in 1849 he was dropped from his post at the clinic and turned down for a teaching post.  Semmelweis spent the next six years at a Hospital in Pest, Hungary, where he reduced mortality rate in the obstetrics department to 0.85% while in Prague and Vienna the rate was still about 10% to 15%.   

Vienna continued to ignore his recommendations.   In 1861, he published a book, but the community rejected his doctrine.  In 1865 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital, where he was beaten by asylum personnel and died.  It took another 14 years for the discovery to be accepted, after Louis Pasteur, in 1879, showed the presence of Streptococcus in the blood of women with child fever. Semmelweis is now recognized as a pioneer of antiseptic policy.

This story is instructive on many levels; the first thing that comes to mind is that developing the best evidence and practices is often even less than half the battle. Ideas that spread and stick need to be sold well too. That is the main idea behind our d.school class on Creating Infectious Action, and great books like Influence and Made to Stick.

P.S. Ronny, thanks for all your great ideas and for sharing this story.

Another Asshole Infested Hospital

As I've written, I first saw how abusive hospitals could be -- especially surgeons working in the operating room -- when my collage Dan Denison spent a week observing a team of operating room nurses in the early 1980's.  The worst actions we were by a surgeon we dubbed Dr.Gooser.  And I was writing The No Asshole Rule, and since I started writing this blog, I've encountered more and more research, and been told more and more stories, suggesting that nurses are among the consistently bullied workers, and doctors are often the culprits.

I just got a long, sad, and quite articulate email from a scrub nurse who feels trapped in one of these asshole infested places.  I suggested that if she could possibly get out, that might be the best thing for her mental health, but it is unclear that she has this option. If not, as I've written in my tips for victims of assholes, this might be one of those cases were organized action could help, but she and others have tried that too. Despite my hesitation about recommending legal action, this just might be a case where that is the best option. Read it and tell me -- and especially her -- what you think is her best course of action.  Here is the email with only the names removed to protect innocent and the guilty -- she first presents what I found to be a very thoughtful contrast between Frankl's classic and The No Asshole Rule, and then gets on to her difficult cas:

I read your book.  You said that we could write to you, so I am.  Right after reading Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search For Meaning", I read your book.  There are a lot of similarities between the two books about how to get along in a bad work environment, even though the content is different.  Frankl survived four Nazi prison camps and wrote about it.  I read Frankl's book and then re-read it, typing important passages into my computer since it was a library book.  By the end, I realized that I should have just bought the book.  Anyway, if you do a quick read of the first half of his book (before the section on Logotherapy), you will see that the similarities on how to deal with the SS and how to deal with today's work bullies are similar. 

I've read most of the how-to-deal-with-bullies-at-work books and I think yours is the most pragmatic.  You use multiple scientific articles to back up your ideas.  Furthermore, most of the other bullying books only deal with what to do if you're the CEO or middle management. If there is a section on what to do if you're a peon, they were obviously written by non-peons and their suggestions were not practical  (i.e. quit; go to HR and complain <HR sides with the bully>; explain yourself to the bully; work harder, maybe it IS you after all; support anti-bullying legislation).  Your book gets into the psyche of the asshole/bully and is more helpful to the peons with better suggestions, even though you cover the CEO's, too. 

Some of your suggestions overlapped Frankl's solutions which were: know what you're getting into before you accept "the job"; let fate take its course and learn to tolerate the abuse; appreciate the good things that happen; escape if you can; avoid the assholes in life if possible; keep your mouth shut and blend in; always let them see you working hard; fantasize about other things; become apathetic to your abuse or other people's abuse; die with dignity by not succumbing to becoming an asshole yourself.  One thing he said that you didn't that I thought might help in another publication was that the prisoner/worker should develop relationships with lateral next line up managers.  In his situation, they were called Capos--inmate prisoner first-line supervisors.  In our day, it would be considered shmoozing or networking with lateral managers (not your own) so that some day, you may get to make a lateral move out from under an abusive boss or maybe another lateral manager that you have befriended will put in a good word for you.  Frankl thought that contemplating winning the war was pointless.  I bet he'd think that anti-bullying legislation was a pie in the sky idea and didn't help the bullying victim in the 'here and now'.

I work with cardiac surgeons.  They are all pretty much cut from the same cloth.  They're all certified assholes, except for one and I've worked with many over the years.  I've been working with one really mean surgeon on a daily basis for 20 years now.  He throws things, calls us names, charges at us like he's going to punch us or shove us, he screams incessantly, he makes jokes about whoever is or isn't there for the amusement of the team.  The team has exhibited mobbing behavior and help to laugh at or target whoever is the target of the day, then they go pat the target on the back after the 8-10 hours of abuse as a parting gift for being the abuse receptacle for the day. 

Several years ago, the surgeon went absolutely nuts and pushed a huge table full of heavy instruments.  Someone caught it before it slammed a nurse into the wall who had her back to the flying table. It could have killed her.  He physically backed up one of the scrub techs against the wall and shook his fists at her, his face beet red and his whole body shaking with anger.  This type of behavior went on for hours as the case dragged on.  He threw things, he screamed and called people names.  In his eyes, everyone was incompetent!  He was hoarse from all of the screaming.  The anesthesiologist (a doctor) who witnessed the whole thing said that the target should have called a lawyer.  Did he go to bat for her to administration?  No.  Did he try to stop the surgeon from ranting?  No.  After the ordeal, one of the other scrub techs wrote a synopsis of what happened and reported the doctor to Human Resources for what he did.  Doctors at our hospital are self-employed.  They are not employees of the hospital.  Furthermore, they bring in a lot of business.  They are in the asset column, we are in the debit column.  We are there to serve the physicians.  A case was built against the girl who filed the complaint.  They looked into her EAP (work sponsored counseling) files to find out if she had gone for counseling (against the law).  They looked into her medical claims to see if she had any counseling and found that she had gone to counseling (also against the law), and she had, for marital counseling.  They called her into the head physician's office and asked her if she was making this claim against the physician because she was unhappy about the outcome of a surgery that the physician in question had performed on her nephew (how did they know that?), but she wasn't unhappy with the way the surgery went on her nephew.  He wanted to know why she was getting counseling.  She just reported what happened, that's all.

The head of HR had a meeting with the scrub tech that the surgeon directed his anger at, and three other members of the team.  Other members of the staff who were helping out that day and not members of the regular cardiac team, including the anesthesiologist, were not asked to attend the meeting.  The scrub tech who made the claim was not asked to attend.  The HR Director leaned over, pointed at the intended recipient of the question and got in everyone's face, and asked them one at a time, "A___ (the scrub tech who reported the incident) writes here that she thought that Dr. Y. was about to physically attack B___.  Did YOU think that Dr. Y. was going to physically attack B___?" "Yes."  "Did YOU think that Dr. Y was going to physcially attack B____?"  "Yes."  Did YOU think that Dr. Y. was going to physically attack B____?"  "Yes."  "B____, you did not report this incident.  Why didn't you report this incident?"  B____ said, "I need this job."  She did not explain that she just bought a house and she found out she is pregnant and her husband had just been laid off from his job.  He leaned forward and asked B____, "B_____, did YOU believe that Dr. Y. was going to physically attack you?"  "Yes."  "Then why didn't you report it?" he asked.  She said, "I need this job.".  He fell back against the back of his seat and grimaced as if to say, "I don't believe it.  Who would put up with that?"  And then she leaned forward, and again repeated the words with conviction, "I NEED this job."  She got paid a little over $10/hour.  All this for $10/hour.  The outcome was that Dr. Y was sent to ONE anger management session.

Fastforward about 7 years.  This type of thing continued to go on, but we learned that we were expendable so no one complained any more.  We learned that it didn't help. Occasionally when Dr. Y misbehaved because he couldn't get what he wanted because of a Department of Health policy and the nurse in the room was trying to uphold the state policies (the RN gets fired when the doctor breaks the State Health Department rules), he would call the head physician of the hospital who would tell the nurses that he has permission to break the rule, just this once, again.  One day recently, Dr. Y. went nuts on another unit, not in the OR.  A group of nurses wrote him up, again, not knowing that it doesn't matter.  After that, he was told that he has to attend another (as in one) anger management class and has been put on probation.  Probation?  That means that we're supposed to watch him for poor behavior and report it, right?  Except that they never told US in the OR that he's on probation or that he was sent to anger management.  They are only telling nursing floors that do not interact with him that he is to be watched.  Therefore, those of us who COULD report about him were kept in the dark.  Not that it matters, of course.  They wouldn't do anything about it.  That same week, an anesthesiologist punched a new nurse in the arm and then shoved her into a wall. There were four witnesses.  A non-witness was asked to write up the incident to report it to the head physician.  The punched nurse had a big bruise on her arm the next day.  The abusive  anesthesiologist was sent to the head physician's office of the hospital by the acting OR nurse manager.  He was told by the head physician of the hospital that "he would be watched".   Watched for what?  And by whom? The partner of Dr. Y, (Dr. X)  heard about this and smiled and said aloud, "Oh boy!  It's open season on nurses!"  Dr. X is currently being investigated by Child Protective Services for beating his own son repeatedly.  As for the temporary head nurse of the OR, she is replacing a nurse with backbone who told the doctors that their abuse couldn't go on. The former head nurse of the OR had been told by senior management that senior management supported her efforts to curb the physician abuse problem.  Then they demoted her.

The irony of all of this is that our marketing campaign for our hospital is "Great Place To Work, Great Place to Recieve Care and a Great Place to Practice Medicine".  Yeah.  There are other stories I could tell you, like the one about an RN with Lou Gehrig's disease not moving fast enough for a surgeon so he threw three big, long, bloody laparscopes at her one at a time, each time hitting her.  She couldn't dodge quite fast enough.  It was reported. Nothing came of it.  That same surgeon shoved a male scrub tech off of his stool a total of three times, too.  Apparently, if you can go three rounds with this surgeon, you've survived that episode. The male scrub tech did not report his incident with this physician because he didn't want to look like a whimp.    When physician abuse events are reported, they are reported to the head physician of the hospital.  We think that the CEO has an active "kill the messenger" program so nobody gives him bad news, including the head physician.  I am cutting the CEO slack in my mind because I can't believe that he would do absolutely nothing about all of this abuse if he just KNEW about it.  He must be kept in the dark on these issues.  I thought for sure, that after Dr. Y's table throwing incident and threatening to hurt B____, that it finally would be dealt with.  It was just too big to ignore. But no, nothing happened, except for the anger management class.  Oh wait a minute.  I just remembered.  One of Dr. Y's ex-partner physicians became an administrator.  He and another administrator presented a business case (financials) against Dr. Y to senior management showing how Dr. Y isn't just an asshole, he's a screw-up and his screw-ups are costing the hospital x number of dollars.  Yes, the CEO finally took action.  He fired the two administrators for plotting against Dr. Y.  You see, Dr. Y is in a protected class.  Dr. Y brought in a lawyer to the meeting saying he was being "harassed".  Case closed.

Honestly, they tell us to "document, document, document" when it comes to abuse.  But when it IS documented, the doctor gets a slap on the wrist (anger management times two--oh yes, and he had to apologize this time) and there is fallout on whoever reported it. A manager actually told us that senior management considers the nurses dealing with Dr. Y as "bunch of whiners".  Without documentation, there's no case.  With it, there's retribution.  What does the CEO really want?

For myself, the biggest sense of disappointment in this whole issue isn't that I'm bullied by assholes.  It is the fact that the CEO sits on his lilly white ass and turns his back to it.  My anger for the bullies in my life is dwarfed by how angry I am at the administration and the CEO who allows it to continue, gives doublespeak about how it won't be tolerated here (great place to work and all that bullshit)---and then tolerates it, offering any one of us up for a human sacrifice on a silver platter at the request of the biggest bully monster physicians.  That's what makes me so fucking angry, disappointed, and disillusioned with the spineless, eunuch "leaders" where I work.  They couldn't last one day in my job with the abuse that is hurled at me.  These nutjob doc