No Asshole Rule: Mid-Summer Round-Up

I have almost made it through most of the emails and messages that piled-up during my vacation and thought it would be fun to list some of the latest news related to The No Asshole Rule.

Il Metodo Antistronzi: Italian Edition Published on August 31^st  Elliot Edizioni is about to publish the Italian edition of The No Asshole Rule. I am told that title means, essentially, the no asshole rule, but perhaps there is a native Italian speaker out there who can explain the nuances of these words. I’ve been talking to quite a few Italian journalists, and am hoping to have as much fun with Il Metodo Antistronzi and the Italian people as I’ve had with Objectif Zéro-sale-con France and Der Arscholch-Faktor in Germany. The book has especially seems to have hit a nerve in Germany, as I am told it has sold more copies per capita in Germany than in the U.S. I am trying to schedule a trip in early October to Rome to promote the book, but am facing some logistical challenges. I hope it works, as I love Italy.

Assholes Seem to Get Away With It.  The annual meeting of my main professional association, the Academy of Management, was held in Philadelphia a couple weeks ago. This is a gathering of several thousand people who do management research from around the world.  Here is a link to a short description on Yahoo!.  There is an active group of researchers in the Academy who do studies of bullying and abusive workplaces. One of the papers that got the most attention from the press was a study of 240 people by , Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.  They found that bad leaders –- including those who are incompetent and those who are bullies – often got away with it. Respondents reported that about 65% of bad leaders either got away with it, or were rewarded with things like promotion despite their lack of skill. This is not a random sample of any known population, it is based on an internet survey, but it strikes me as consistent was other published research on bullies.  Some other findings reported by the Academy of Management about this study include: 

“About 29% of respondents indicated that the principal impact of bad leaders on them personally was in engendering such serious stress symptoms as insomnia, bad dreams, general fatigue, and loss of concentration. About 16% blamed a bad leader for emotional effects, such as hating one's job, dreading going to work, and feeling depressed about work life; another 15% identified negative effects on personal relationships outside the workplace.”

“Asked about the bad leader's impact on their work performance, by far the largest number (33.6%) cited lowered motivation, which included lowered enthusiasm, goofing off, and just going through the motions.”

“Asked whether they believed that the particular bad leader they singled out was widely viewed as bad, about 90% indicated that this was the case, 40.”

Not a pretty picture! When organizations have  and  actually enforce no asshole  rules,  however,  the  creeps are a lot less likely  to get away with  their abuse.

Lutgen-Sandvik’s Research on Bullying. I have been exchanging email with and reading papers by Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, an Assistant Professor at The University of New Mexico. I will devote a post to her work in the future, after I read her papers again and think about them more. Her complete dissertation is available on her website, and while most dissertations are truly awful, barely readable and thick with obscure details, Pam’s is the rare compelling read. She reports in-depth case studies and analysis of how victims of bullying fought back, and what methods are most likely to succeed.  One of her main findings, for example, is that people who work in concert with others – - rather than alone –-  to battle back are more likely to succeed, to keep their own jobs and to force the bully out. Now, that sounds like common sense, and I suppose it is, but I think it is important to have common sense backed by more rigorous research, because sometimes common sense turns out to be wrong. In addition to in-depth qualitative research, Pam and her colleagues conducted a survey of American, Finnish, and Danish workers, and found that American workers (47%) were far more likely to report being the victim of at least one act of bullying per week than workers in Finland (24%) or in Denmark (16%). Again, I will write more about Pam’s research, but here is a press release describing this survey study.

Bob Nardelli at Chrysler?  Given Nardelli’s poor reputation for employee relations at Home Depot, I was pretty shocked to discover that he was tapped to lead and save Chrysler. Perhaps I am missing something, but putting a possible asshole in charge of a company that depends so heavily on good relationships with unions, white collar workers, suppliers, the press, and so on strikes me as a strange move. On the plus side, I do think that toughness is something that every auto executive needs and that being from outside the industry might be useful, as my experience with American automobile companies is that – - even if what they are doing isn’t working –-  they keep doing what they’ve always done before because, well, they’ve always done it before!

Fun talk at Mozilla. I gave a no asshole rule talk at Mozilla earlier in the week, the folks who bring you the open source Firefox browsers. Talk about an asshole-free place. As Asa Dotzler – Mozilla's open-source marketing guru – put it, the work they do requires so much cooperation with each other  and with people from outside the company (many of whom are volunteers, who do the coding or marketing Firefox out love for the product and what it represents about a participative and decentralized approach to the Internet), that acting like an asshole is rare because it is so downright dumb when you need so much mutual respect and trust to get the work done. It is amazing organization, with about 100 employees and over 100 million users. And the browser is now in over 30 languages, and is especially popular in Europe where it has over 30% market share in countries like Germany. Mozilla employee Jay Patel wrote a little about it as well on his blog too.

Lucky 13.  The No Asshole Rule Continues to hang around on a number of best-seller lists. It is currently at #13 on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and has been on the list for four months, starting-off at #2.

Bad Boss Contest. Vote for the Biggest Asshole! Working America, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO (the powerful labor union) is running its second annual “Bad Boss Contest.” The have collected hundreds of bad boss stories and are now down to the six finalists. I’ve been working with them a little, and contributed a little set of tips about dealing with a bad boss and am listed as a “Bad Boss Expert”  along with others including Jane Fonda! Visit the website and vote for your favorite bad boss story. The winner is decided on August 21^st. Here is the current leader in the contest with over 350 votes:

Pete Yonski,Illinois

My story starts with me being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. I am in my early thirties and have not worked since March of this year. I also have three young children under the age of 8, and a wife who cannot work due to my condition. I think you get the idea.

In the industry I work in, disability benefits are available but only equal about one-half of what I normally would be making. These benefits are formulated from a day to day basis for days you have received no other compensation for. Needless to say, every day claimed is extremely important in the basic task of feeding my family and keeping the lights on.

I have been an employee for about 10 years and as such, I have built up some paid time off. I sent paperwork in to take some of my time off, to help pay the bills, but when the paycheck came, I was short on several days. This was compounded when I did not claim disability benefits on the days I thought I was being paid for. As an end result, I lost out on my vacation days AND DISABILITY BENEFITS. Talk about getting hit where it hurts.

My boss threw away the paperwork I sent in and then lied about ever receiving it knowing that filing a grievance for the time I should have received would take months if not years to resolve. Its hard enough just trying to stay alive, let alone trying to pull knifes out of not only my back, but the backs of my wife and children too.

ARSE Test Approaching 110,000 completions. I got a note from Aaron Mentele of Electric Pulp that over 107,000 people have now completed Asshole Rating Self-Exam. The self examination continues! The numbers for the Flying ARSE are respectable, with about 6500, completions, but clearly, the original ARSE is “viral” in a way that the “airplane” version is not.

 Value Rich: A Cartoon Review. The current version of this magazine has one of the most creative and fun reviews of The No Asshole Rule I've seen. Check out New Book Gives The Boot To Jerks. There is cartoon to go with each of the seven chapters in the book, I think my favorite is the one above from Chapter 1, of Dr. Gooser doing his dirty work.

 

Comments

[Diego]

Love those cartoons!!!!!!!!