Bob Sutton

Adopting The No Asshole Rule: Don't Bother If The Words Are Hollow

I just got off the phone with executives from an unnamed large company who are thinking about implementing a "no jerk rule." I am, of course, a big fan of this idea. And there are organizations that have such rules and the implement them effectively, such as Baird, the financial services firm.

But I think they were a bit taken aback by how vehement I was about the dangers of just plastering the words everywhere, and not following it with the real work of implementing The No Asshole Rule (and, of course, this applies to any other norm in the organization... we wrote a lot about this in The Knowing-Doing Gap).  I wanted to know if the reward and prestige systems already supported the rule, and if not, how they were going to change things.  I wanted to know if the senior executives already modeled the right behavior, and if not, was something being done to make sure they changed their behavior.  I wanted to know if there were known assholes in visible positions, and if there were, was something going to be done to change their behavior or send them packing --to signal that the words were not hollow. 

As with all norms, the espoused beliefs don't mean much unless they are backed by what people do -- especially during the little moments.  Google is an interesting case in point.  Although they are imperfect like every human organization, it remains a civilized place because, as one senior executive explained to me years ago, "it isn't efficient to be an asshole here."  That is a sign to me that the norm is working, and all the strategy and product stuff aside, it is impressive they seem to have sustained this norm despite their size and the relentless performance pressures.  

To return to the dangers of hollow rhetoric: It is especially destructive when it comes to the no jerk or or no asshole rule.  When organizations say it, but don't do it, when it does not constrain and describe how people act -- and no serious efforts are being made to begin implementing the norm -- the result is that double-whammy:  Leaders are seen as both assholes and hypocrites.  

What Would You Do If Your Doctor Relied on a Book Like This?

As regular readers of this blog will know,  I am a strong advocate of evidence-based management.  Yes, there are times when sound evidence isn't available, can't be generated fast enough to make a pressing decision, or clashes so much that you need to go with your gut instinct.  But there are plenty of times when good evidence is available and ignoring it is management malpractice.  This is not only the basis of the book Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote, Hard Facts, it is a theme that runs through all my books.  There are certainly times when I express opinions that reflect my values and biases, or offer hunches or gut reactions that aren't grounded in strong evidence-- I try to make clear when that is the case.  That is human enough, part of the creative process (see my P.S.), and as I said, sometimes necessary when no good data are available, but a pressing problem exists.

But a huge flaw in the current practice of management is the often open disdain for sound evidence and logic that does or could exist, which is then quickly followed by absurd and extreme claims that are reminiscent of old-fashioned snake oil salespeople.

Imagine if you had a serious illness and your doctor suggested a serious of treatments. She proudly proclaimed that it wasn't based on any theory or evidence, but assured you it would be effective.   Sounds like she is a quack, doesn't it? Pretty much the same thing happens all the time in management.  As an example, Jeff Pfeffer got a request to write a blurb for a book this week (I will not reveal the name to protect the innocent and the guilty) that begins with this claim:

Don’t buy this book if you have the time and inclination for studying theoretical concepts. You’ll be disappointed in less than an hour.

Do buy this book if you’re in a hurry and want to accelerate your achievements and your goals. You’ll be moving faster in less than an hour.

I was a bit annoyed by the dig at concepts, as to me, that is an irrational rejection of sound logic. But what really bothered me was the second claim because, if you reject theory and evidence, how could you support such a claim? 

I don't think there is any evidence that any management book can lead to significant self or organizational improvement after an hour of reading.  That is simply an unsupported claim.  It is, however, a nearly perfect example of Bullshit, at least as defined in the bestseller of the same name. As author Harry Frankfurt explained:

"It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit."

Following Frankfurt's perspective, a book like this one -- and so much other management advice -- fit the definition of bullshit quite well -- people aren't exactly lying, they simply have no interest or respect for the truth. They just want your money.

P.S. If you want to read about a great example of a leader and, now investor, who cares about the truth, check-out this fantastic post by John Lilly, who grew Mozilla from 12 to 600 employees and now is a VC at a very hot firm called Greylock, which just hired a data scientist.  At the same time, John emphasizes that much of the creative process necessary for entrepreneurship requires inspiration, whims, and hunches -- sometimes  fueled imperfect but rich and emotionally compelling illustrations from ethnography and related methods.  John offers the motto, "Design like you are right, read the data like you are wrong."  I love that, as it shows the path for linking the messiness and courage required for human creativity with the rigorous reality checks that are hallmarks of evidence-based action.  It is also a good example of the attitude of wisdom, which Jeff and I have written about a lot.

Indira Gandhi on Doing Work Versus Taking Credit For It

I had a meeting today with my colleague Huggy Rao where we were batting around various ideas about systems that are effective versus ineffective at scaling good ideas. Huggy brought up this cool quite from Indira Gandhi:

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

He then went on to argue that systems that bring-in, develop, and reward people in the first group  -- and that expel, reform, and punish people in the second group -- are likely to be more effective at spreading and implementing constructive action. Sounds right to me.

Hope for HP's Culture

The histories of the Stanford School of Engineering (where I work) and HP are closely intertwined.  Most famously, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard were young guys, they borrowed $500 from Fred Terman, then Dean of the school, to start the company.   There are at least three buildings in the Engineering School donated by Bill and Dave.  Appropriately,  they are the Terman building, the Hewlett building, and the Packard building. 

The events over the past decade or so have led this once beautiful relationship to dim -- nothing nasty has happened, it has just sort of faded along with the decline of HP's once vibrant innovative and humane spirit.   Carly Fiorina got so mad at the Hewlett & Packard foundations that she changed the name of the company from Hewlett-Packard to HP -- because these foundations opposed the merger she led between Compaq and HP.  This dimmed the company's links to its founders, and indirectly, to Stanford.  Moreover, the Compaq merger brought in many executives with no geographical or emotional ties to Stanford.  The ties really faded under the Mark Hurd era as he had little emotional connection to Stanford, did major acquisitions like EDS in Texas that further scattered HP's geographical identity, and during his era of cost cutting, nastiness, and lack of emphasis on innovation, HP further lost its soul. 

I know many former HP executives, managers, and engineers and this is the exact phrase the all seem to use to describe what happened. They talk about it almost as if it is a human death, uniformly emphasizing that the HP that exists today is not the company the worked for -- many say they worked for Hewlett-Packard, not HP.  Moreover, when I came to Stanford, HP was THE employer of choice in Silicon Valley for Stanford Engineering students-- it is now viewed as an employer of last resort by most students. 

As such, I was delighted to see the honesty and ambition expressed by HP's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, in this report:

“HP has lost its soul,” he said in an interview at Hewlett-Packard’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, offering a glimpse of the vision he will outline in greater detail at an event on March 14 in San Francisco. “The first thing I wanted to do when I joined HP was listen to the people. The rank and file usually know about all the shortcomings.”

This is a dramatic change in behavior. I love that he is telling the turth and using the same term that everyone else does to describe HP.   I wish Mr. Apotheker well and look forward to a day when, once again, the best and the brightest Stanford engineers are clamoring to work at HP.  Perhaps Mr. Apotheker should change the name of the company back to Hewlett-Packard.  Short of that, I suggest they remove the word  "Invent" from the company signage -- see the above sign at company headquarters in Palo Alto. They use this logo and slogan on all their buildings.  As one former HP executive explained, once they put that word on the signs, she knew that HP's brilliant culture of innovation was fading fast. You don't see the word invent at Pixar, Apple, IDEO, or Facebook.   They don't need to talk about it because they do it and it runs deep in their souls.

P.S. Check out Tom Stewart's great post at BNET on What HP's New Chief Needs Most.

Kurt Vonnnegut on "Having Enough" A Reminder From The No Asshole Rule

Yesterday, I was talking to a pair of very smart and very ambitious friends.  As I told them, I am all for high performing teams, excellence in performance, and I love the restlessness that drives creative people at places like Apple, Pixar, and Facebook.  But there is a negative underbelly to this human drive toward achievement.  It can become a disease where, no matter how much some people get, they keep wanting more, and the result is not only chronic unhappiness for themselves and those around them, it is also often propels unethical and otherwise inhuman behavior. 

The worst examples are seen in the power poisoning and associated delusions among the worst of political leaders, with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his sons disgusting antics currently playing starring roles on the international stage.  But my focus has been on more mundane crimes against humanity.  In particular, if the charges are true, the insider trading and other unlawful actions taken by Galleon Group's  Raj Rajaratnam, whose trial just started, reflect a similar human flaw. Even more shocking to me is the news this week that Rajat Gupta -- former board member at Procter & Gamble and at Goldman Sachs, and former Managing Director of McKinsey -- was charged with insider trading.  Procter & Gamble and McKinsey are two firms I know pretty well, and while there is a strong focus on excellence in both places, I was troubled because -- each in their own way -- they are among the most ethical and non-greedy cultures I have ever encountered. 

The fact that such a central player in both places fell victim to such apparent bad judgment and greed means, to me, that no matter how wonderful you may think you are as a human-bring,and no matter how good the people around you might be,  we are all at risk of falling prey to own greed, status insecurities, and that feeling that comes with power that "the rules are for the little people."   Apparently, part of Gupta's defense will be that, if he did leak inside information to Raj Rajaratnam, he personally did not benefit financially (See this New York Times column).  To me, this defense is meaningless -- at least from a moral perspective --  because it simply suggests that Gupta was trying to get more status from Raj Rajaratnam, pay back some old favor, or set the stage for a future one -- all signs of greed (and perhaps some insecurity too -- often a hallmark of very successful people).

The lesson for all of us, as I emphasized in The No Asshole Rule, is that sometimes it can be remarkably useful to tell yourself "I have enough."  Here is an excerpt from a longer post I put-up in early 2007 on the official publication day of The No Asshole.  Current events suggest that this lesson from the late Kurt Vonnegut  is worth bringing it out again (I edited it lightly for clarity):

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

I wrote some anonymous New Yorker address to ask permission to reprint the poem, and to my amazement, I received a personal reply from Vonnegut about two weeks later (see it here).  The postcard he sent me was not only in his handwriting. He gave me permission to use the poem "however you please without compensation or further notice to me."  It remains one of my favorite things.

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

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

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

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

Joe Heller  

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

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

--Kurt Vonnegut

The New Yorker, May 16^th, 2005

(Reprinted with Kurt Vonnegut’s permission)

To return to Rajat Gupta, if the charges against him are true, it might have spared him and his former colleagues much pain if he had repeated  "I have enough"  to himself over and and over again at key moments.  While this lesson may come too late for him, it isn't for many of us.

Do you want to DO design thinking? Start with the d.School's Bootcamp Bootleg

Last year, I wrote about the first Bootcamp Bootleg here, a compilation of materials and methods assembled by the team that teaches our introductory course on design thinking at the Stanford d.school, which we call Bootcamp. As with last year's model, you can download the latest version free, courtesy of the d.school.  The team has outdone themselves this year, the content is just awesome -- fun to read, detailed, useful, and great pictures and drawings to guide and inspire anyone who is applying design thinking (from novices to veterans). 

I love the opening paragraph:

Check this out —
It’s the d.school bootcamp bootleg.

This compilation is intended as an active toolkit to support your design thinking practice. The guide is not just to read – go out in the world and try these tools yourself. In the following pages, we outline each mode of a human centered design process, and then describe dozens of specific methods to do design work. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which support the seven mindsets — shown on the following page – that are vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold.

Then the fun begins.  Here is the crisp summary of the d.school philosophy:

Show don't tell.  Focus on human values. Craft clarity. Embrace experimentation. Be mindful of process. Bias toward action. Radical collaboration

Then it goes through the fives "modes" of the design process (By the way, note the term "mode" rather than "step" or stage"  is important here because we never mean to convey that this is a clean and linear process):

Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test.

To me,while philosophy and process are important, the real stuff, the material here that really makes the Bootleg so valuable, are the dozens of methods it contains.  These have been tried and fine-tuned for the six or seven years the d.school has been around, and for decades before that at places including IDEO and the Stanford Product Design program.   In d.school speak, these methods help you DO TO THINK.  Here are a few samples, there are many more:

Assume a beginners mindset. Use a camera study. Interview for empathy. Extreme users. Team share and capture. Journey map. Empathy map. Fill-in-the blank character profile. Why-how laddering. Point-of-view want-ad. "How might we" questions. Stoke. Facilitate a brainstorm. Bodystorming. Impose constraints.

Try the Bootleg. You will like most of it -- and will probably get frustrated and fail along the way too. That's part of the process too.  Please let us know what did and did not work for you. Let us know you changed or, as we say "flexed," these methods so they would work for you.  And please let us know other methods you have used, and perhaps invented, to do design thinking

Once again, a big thanks to the team that developed the first cut at the Bootleg last year and the team that cranked0out this lovely revision.

Team Guidelines From A New Boss: How Can He Make Sure People Live Them?

I got a fascinating note from an employee of a big company about the "team norms" that were articulated by his new boss.  I think they are great, but have a crucial question about them. Here they are: 

I. Show respect

Support one another...don't blind-side one another in public.

 Provide one another with a safe place...honor confidentiality.

 Show up to meetings on time...and if you're running late, call.

 Maintain professionalism...especially with clients / learners.

II. Be transparent

No hidden agendas

Get to the point...don't beat around the bush. 

III. Stay positive

Celebrate successes

Have fun

Here is my question. Talk is not a substitute for action.  Guidelines like these are great when they are drive and reflect behavior, but when they are consistently violated, they are worse than having no guidelines at all because the stench of hypocrisy fills the air.  As such, what advice do you have for this boss to make sure that his team actually lives these norms?

My first thought was that he should focus on what happens when team members -- or himself -- violate the norms.  After all, in any human group, people will break rules.  In healthy groups, bosses call out others (and themselves) when transgressions occur, but do it in ways that builds rather than destroys safety and trust.  It's noteasy to do, but I;'ve seen great bosses like IDEO's David Kelley do it in masterful ways.

That's my first thought. I would love to hear others.

P.S. A big thanks to the unnamed employee for sending these norms to me.

A Concise and Brilliant Peer-Reviewed Article on Writer's Block

Below you can see an entire article (including a reviewer's comment) that may look fake, but is legitimate. It was published by Dennis Upper in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1974, and is funny, true, and inspired -- and a great demonstration that "brevity is the soul of wit."   Academics, especially the editor's of our journals, have a well-deserved reputation for being humorless assholes (note I edited a couple academic journals and include myself in this swipe), so I give these editors a lot of credit.  A big thanks to Thomas Haymore for telling me about this masterpiece and to Professor Brad DeLong for publishing it on his blog a few days ago.

The Difference Between a Bad Job and The Wrong Job

I was interviewed for a New York Times column by Phyllis Korkki on The True Calling That Wasn't, which appeared last Sunday.  In course of the conversation, I started thinking about what I learned from Richard Hackman (one of my mentors) about what kinds of jobs motivate people and about theory and research on identity in organizations.   In doing so, I realized that while much of what I write about focuses on bad versus good bosses, jobs, and organizations, that I ought to also be emphasizing that there are many perfectly good jobs out there held be people who are, nonetheless, quite unhappy because the kind of work they do, the mission of their organization, and a host of other factors simply do not mesh well who they are and what they would want to be. 

Of course, one of the key dimensions here is whether a person is an extrovert or an introvert.  I had a little glimpse of this with my own family a few weeks back when we were on vacation in Mexico, and my daughter and wife started talking about what job they would most like at the resort.  My daughter loved the idea of being the bartender because there would so many people to talk to; my wife picked being one of the landscapers because the idea of working in silence and sustaining beautiful plants and grounds appealed to her sense of order and aesthetics.  In her case, I should add one of the main reasons that she loves her job is that helping girls grow into confident young woman with great skills and character counts so strongly in her value system, that doing all the extroverted things she does as CEO of the Girl Scouts of Northern California trumps her inner introvert.

But some of us have jobs that don't fit who we are and we would be much happier doing another kind of work.  As the article says, in talking to Phyllis, I thought of three signs that someone is in the wrong job. These are:

1. "People whose careers aren’t the right fit often feel like impostors, even if they are very skilled at their jobs."

2. "Another symptom is constant annoyance with the demands being made of them, even though these are reasonable for the business they’re in."

3. "An additional warning sign is a feeling that their current work doesn’t rank very high in their value system."

This little list just begins to scratch the surface.  As we are -- I hope -- beginning to move to a time when many people who have decent jobs that don't fit their identity can find a better calling.

I wonder: What are other signs that a competent person is in the wrong job?  And, when they are looking for a new job, what are signs it will be better for them?

AT&T's Suicidal System: How Apple Stores Teach People to Despise the Company

I did a post a couple days back about my mixed reactions to the iPad. I also started writing about AT&T but it ran so long that I realized it was really a new post.  The upshot is that I am both bewildered and fascinated by AT&T's suicidal tendencies.  I suspect that the people who run that company have not quite come to grips with the deadly mix of their horrible system and the brilliantly managed Apple stores -- where so many people are forced to purchase their services.  I wonder if they realize that each Apple store appears to serve as a grass roots organization for providing people with bad experiences with AT&T, watching others have bad experiences with AT&T, and an arena for telling and listening to horror stories about AT&T among customers and Apple employees.  If a panel of experts tried to design a system to destroy AT&T's reputation among its most valuable customers and salespeople, I am not sure they could do a  better job than what seems to be happening in Apple stores throughout the country.

Rather than buying a new iPad last week, I thought about waiting for the iPad that allows you to connect to the web anywhere through an AT&T account (not just via wifi as my model does).  But I have had so many experiences with that deeply defective organization that I do whatever I can to avoid entanglements with AT&T. I have had multiple lousy experiences with AT&T in recent months, and based on my experience at least, I suggest you never believe any of their promises and always assume they are up selling you. They don't care about you, they just want to squeeze every cent out of you.  I  also found that when they up, they often aren't trained well-enough to explain the strings attached and limitations.

My worst and most intriguing experience in recent months happened one Friday in March when my wife, two teenage daughters, and I were trapped in the Apple store in downtown Palo Alto.  Our salesperson there spent a full four hours trying to get something done for us with AT&T.  I thought it would be pretty easy but turned out to be absurdly complicated --  we were buying one new iPhone and replacing another that had been stolen from my daughter.  The Apple guy ultimately succeeded despite dozens of obstacles put up by AT&T's people, system, and rules (which were interpreted differently by just about every employee he and we dealt with, by the way).  Our Apple guy succeeded only through his raw persistence and because, as he explained, he had learned that such a high percentage of the AT&T people are so incompetent, that sometimes the best thing to do is to just hang-up and start from scratch (in hopes the next one will be competent). I believe that, in the process of making this happen, at least 10 different phone calls were made to At&T, some by him and some by us.  During this time, we talked to virtually every employee and manager in the place, and each assured us that our salesperson was among their best people.  The problem, they explained, was that AT&T can be impossible and time-consuming to deal with -- and their system meshes very poorly with Apple's in many ways.

An added problem is that the AT&T people are apparently on a  flawed incentive system. So rather than actually trying to what was best for us as customers or relationships with Apple, there was constant up selling  directly to us and through our Apple person -- which he resisted and advised us to ignore. He also reported that, on multiple occasions, AT&T employees resisted doing what was needed to get our phones working because it meant they would get no incentive pay (I never quite understood this, but I heard him say many times to AT&T employees something like "I know this will mean you don't get your incentive, but this is how what we have to do it to serve the customer.")   I was amazed to find that AT&T does not have a dedicated hot line that enables Apple salespeople and "Geniuses" to connect directly to AT&T people who are especially trained to deal with Apple stores as Apple sells so many AT&T accounts -- but apparently that isn't the case. I would give At&T a solid "F" on customer service, relationships with a key vendor, incentive system, and organization based on my recent experiences with them.

I would love to have a film of our experience in the Apple store to show to AT&T executives.  We were there so long that virtually every employee in the place at one time or another came up to us and told us there favorite story about how much AT&T sucked and how lucky we were to have the most skilled and persistent person in the place helping us. Also, quite a few customers overheard the stories or asked us what was going on, and jumped into the conversation with their own bad experiences.  This was a busy Friday night at the store closest to Steve Jobs' house, and in fact, it was the store where he made a surprise appearance the day the iPad was released.  Perhaps AT&T ought to spend less money advertising and brag less about wonderful they are and devote more attention to fixing their defective system and improving their training.  I especially believe that they don't quite fathom how much damage their incentive system does because it focuses their people away from helping customers and toward getting as much money as possible out of them. Perhaps they should read Steve Kerr's classic "On The Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B."

In any event, for better worse, the effect of all this is that tens of thousands of customers a day get to experience Apple's competence and AT&T's incompetence side-by-side in a public arena.  This contrast not only affects the particular employees and customers involved in a given transaction, it often spreads to many others in the setting -- especially when it is a long ugly one like ours.

If you are an AT&T executive, you don't need a fancy survey, you don't need a marketing consultant, just walk into a few Apple stores and ask employees and customers what they think of your company and why. And stand around awhile and watch the dynamics surrounding the especially bad customer experiences.  Apple stores create experiences that teach customers and key opinion leaders to despise your company and see it as greedy, incompetent, and out of touch. 

As always, I assume I am biased and my experiences are not representative. Am I being unfair to AT&T? Have others had good experiences with them, especially in Apple stores?  Note that I had good experiences when I simply bought my iPhone, but whenever anything at all complicated has happened, it has been awful.

Repairs at the Cleveland Clinic

Please forgive my vague post a couple weeks back saying that Work Matters would be silent for a few weeks, but I wanted to protect my family's privacy as I had a serious health matter to deal with.  I am glad to say I on the mend and (slowly) getting back to work far more quickly than expected. 

On April 6th, I had open heart surgery at the renowned Cleveland Clinic to fix a leaky aortic valve.  This problem was detected about five years ago and my doctors have been keeping an eye on it since then.  Essentially, the problem was that my valve was leaking badly enough that about 50% of the blood that it pumped out was leaking back in.  This is probably something I was born with that just got worse over the years.  I was without symptoms, and in fact, until a just a few days before the surgery, was riding my bike through the hills around Stanford for a good 90 minutes at least 5 times a week -- in part I kept of the exercise because, as my doctors advised, the better shape I was in going into surgery, the better shape I would be coming out.  It was also crucial to maintaining my mental health. But as there was eventual risk of heart failure, my doctors helped me make the decision to have the surgery before any irreversible damage occurred.  I was also pleased to discover from various other tests that (despite my family history of blocked arteries and an imperfect diet and other health behaviors) my coronary arteries were clear and so there is no indication I will need anything stents or a bypass in the foreseeable future and that the repair should last a long time.

I went through a fairly complex decision process with numerous conflicting opinions about whether to do it at Stanford or Cleveland, whether to wait or do it now, and what kind of valve to have (tissue --usually from a cow or pig --or mechanical).   I decided on Cleveland because they do so many more of these surgeries than Stanford and, as I decided on a tissue valve, they especially do far more of those (perhaps 1000 a year) than other places -- and volume is among the main predictors of surgical success. I also was impressed by their low mortality and complication rates and that they simply seemed generally more organized than Stanford.  Of course, their are many great places to get heart surgery, and Stanford is one of them. but I was more comfortable with Cleveland.  So, although I never thought of myself as a medical tourist, there I was, fitting the definition perfectly.  Fortunately, my Stanford insurance appears to apply in Cleveland as well as it would in California.  I would describe the Cleveland Clinic as a kind of heart surgery factory. but one where nearly every employee we met, from the people who cleaned the floors and rooms, to the dedicated nurses (especially Amanda, Theresa, and the rather magical Virginia), to the cardiologists and surgeons, where competent and compassionate.  Many employees at the clinic wear buttons (see to the left) that say "Patients First." If my experience is representative, this isn't just hollow talk, that saying guides and reflects how people at the Clinic think and act.

I am especially grateful to my surgeon, Dr. Marc Gillinov (pictured to the left).  Dr. Gillinov is surrounded with a team that worked together to keep track of the big picture and little details associated with each patient -- which I found most comforting as in too many hospitals information flow is remarkably bad.  Gillinov also operated on Robin Williams, doing a very similar operation, cow valve and all.  Check out this video of Robin Williams on Letterman talking joking about the surgery… at one point Robin does an imitation/paradoy of Gillinov’s voice that is pretty spot on:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IhaAC4dN2Q.   Not only is Gillinov quite famous on the traditional measures used to judge surgeons (experience, awards, publications in peer reviewed journals) and well-loved by those who work with him (rather than respected but deeply feared and disdained for his narcissism, which are hallmarks of too many other world-class surgeons), he has a child-like enthusiasm about practicing his craft. Dr. Gillinov  seems to bounce around the hospital spreading positive energy -- one of is colleagues said her nickname for him was "Sparky."  He loves his job as much as anyone I ever met --  the last time I encountered that same level of dedication, joy, and pursuit of perfection all in one package happened several years back when a group of us interviewed Brad Bird, Pixar's Academy Award winning director. 

I also want to give a huge thanks to my primary care doctor in Palo Alto, the amazing Jeffrey Croke (pictured to the left), who first detected the problem and provided clarity at a key moment when I was receiving conflicting opinions  and to Dr. Erik Price, my cardiologist in Palo Alto, who is better at explaining things than anyone I have ever met.  I was helped by so many doctors and nurses at Cleveland, and was sufficiently delirious much of the time, that I can't remember them all (I mentioned a few by first nake above), but I want to mention and thank Chris Webb, a Cardiothoracic Nurse Practioner who did such a great job of keeping track of my case as a whole and Dr. Colleen Koch for special help getting a great cardiothoracic anesthesiologist Michelle Capdeville.  My brain seems to be working just as well (or some would say just as badly) as before the surgery.  For this kind of surgery,  where I went on the heart-lung machine,  a big part of the anesthesiologist's job is to protect the brain.  And I was especially taken with the Dr. William Stewart, a cardiologist at Cleveland who showed remarkable wisdom -- especially  the ability to treat me as a whole person rather a collection of symptoms.  I will eventually do a post about just Dr. Stewart, as I found him to be such an exceptional human-being.  

I don't want to leave the impression that every thing went absolutely perfectly, that I was the perfect patient, or that the people at Cleveland are without flaws.  None of that is true, as I have more than my shares of human flaws, the Clinic is a human organization, and as in all places, some people are stronger and more caring than others. I also  can't assure anyone that they will have as positive an experience at Cleveland as I did -- there are always risks and variation across cases.   But for me, the experience (and so far the outcome) have turned out better than I ever hoped.  Today, just two weeks after surgery, I feel far better than I ever thought was possible at this juncture.   This is serious surgery as they crack open your chest, put you on the heart lung machine, stop your heart, cut out (and repair) the bad parts and put in new good ones.   In my case, I have a new aortic valve that that is built around a cow's valve (see the picture to the left) and they also did repairs to the "aortic root"  by replacing much of the tissue with Dacron.  I have some aches and pains and am taking some pain pills.  But I am up and around, able to work three or four hours a day, and have done a 45 minute walk each of the last two days (with a little rest in the middle).  And my mind feels quite clear -- although in evaluating this post and other things I write (as I slowly return to work) in the coming couple weeks, please keep in mind that they are written by a man who is slightly stoned on Oxycondone. 

Thank so all of you who wrote comments and nice personal emails in response to my post saying I was out for awhile, and to my family, friends, and colleagues for being so supportive.  Please forgive me if I am a little slower to respond to things than is usual, as I am trying to pace myself.

NUMMI Story on This American Life

I have been following the NUMMI plant (in Fremont California) in a haphazard way since it was opened as joint venture by Toyota and GM in the 1980s.  I have visited a few times and talked to lots of folks from GM, Toyota, and NUMMI since its inception.  As most of you probably know, the plant is closing on April 1.  It is just a shame for many reasons, the jobs lost, the failure of GM to learn what they should have from the joint venture, the feelings of helplessness and on and on.

If you want to learn about the plant's history from its birth to (nearly) its death, check out the astounding episode of This American Life, a compelling tale of how it went from the worst of the worst GM plants (drug use and drinking were routine on the line, and you could buy sex in the plant -- and the quality and cost numbers were awful), to how Toyota started the NUMMI plant (the only unionized Toyota plant in the country) with a workforce composed (85%) of the same people who worked at that awful plant, how they retrained them in Japan, how these same workers once put in a different system started making some of the highest quality cars in the U.S. -- even the world --  from the day the plant opened, to all the twists and turns including how Toyota itself is repeating some of the same mistakes that nearly killed GM, and onto the near final sadness.

I am a big fan of This American Life and I think this is one of their best episodes ever.  The lessons about the power of a good -- versus a lousy -- system are especially compelling, as is the rather pathetic tale of GM's inability to learn from NUMMI.  Their quality still trails behind most of the rest of the world now, over 25 years since the NUMMI plant opened.

Fascinating stuff. I will start assigning this episode to my classes, there are so many great lessons and it is so emotionally compelling.

Boris Groysberg's Research on Star Employees: Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth

I have written here fairly often about research by Harvard Business School's Boris Groysberg on the virtues and limits of star employees.  One of my posts described has delightful research that shows firms should steal superstar women, not men.  It turns out that when star men move to another firm, they tend to do a lot worse in the new setting.  In contrast, star women tend to sustain their performance when they go to another firm.  Groysberg suggests this difference is explained because women are more skilled at establishing new relationships and less likely to engage in dysfunctional internal competition in their new firms.

Boris's new research is equally fascinating, a while back, he sent me an article he wrote with two colleagues called called "Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth" (see complete reference below). They studied over 6000 industry analysts from 246 research departments in Wall Street firms -- these are people who write reports about the current and expected performance of firms, and who specializes in particular industries. Their reports predict future earnings for companies and contain recommendations about whether to buy or sell stocks.  As Boris and his colleagues show, some of these analysts are stars, selected by the Institutional Investor as being the top person in their industry and being picked as a star is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation.  The results of this research are interesting because, while some leaders might think that there is no such thing as having too many stars, Boris and his colleagues found a curvilinear relationship between the number of stars in a group and overall performance -- so, having a few stars help, have a few more doesn't hurt (but doesn't help), but groups reach a tipping point where too many stars seem to dampen performance. 

Groysberg and his colleagues suggest that the "too many cooks" problem happens because partly because, when a group is filled with individual stars, the dynamics degenerate because people devote excessive attention to the the internal status game and competition and hesitate to share information that may help the group as a whole, but will threaten their standing in the group.  In other words, when there are too many stars, people focus on what is best for themselves, see other top performers as people who are in the way rather than people they should help, and the overall performance of the team seems less important.

This is just one study, but a quite rigorous one one.  And it adds for evidence to the claim that Jeff Pfeffer made in the The Knowing-Doing Gap that dysfunctional internal competition is one of the most vile impediments to turning knowledge into action in groups and organizations.  Once the game becomes "I win when you lose," the team or organization suffers.

Here is the complete reference: Groysberg, Boris, Jeffrey T. Polzer, and Hillary Anger Elfenbein. "Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth: How High Status Individuals Decrease Group Effectiveness." Organization Science (forthcoming). 

Is It Time for a Stupid Rules Contest at Stanford?

I love my university, I've been treated far better than I deserve during my 25 plus years at Stanford.  But as much a I love it, I wonder if it is time for us to run something like a "stupid rules contest" here.  I once met the CEO of a large bank in New England who explained to me how they had made things much better by running such a contest and taking the suggestions seriously. For example, they got rid of a rule that people waiting outside a branch could not be let in until official opening time.  They changed things so, if it was 10 or 15 minutes before opening time and, say, people were waiting outside in the cold, employees could open the door and let them wait in the warm lobby.

I don't want to mention any specific rules at Stanford, as I don't want to point fingers at any group or person.  But although no doubt each was developed and implemented with the best of intentions, it seems to me that they accumulate like barnacles on a ship, with one after another being added.  Each one slows down the process of teaching and research, and the old ones never seem to be removed.

Perhaps a stupid rules contest here would help. I admire Stanford's leaders, so this is not meant to be an attack on any individual, I just think it is something that happens to organizations over time, and I wonder if it would be a good time to haul our organizational ship into the dry dock and scrape off some of those old barnacles -- and perhaps some new ones we have grown to that make things harder to do than need be. 

"William Safire is on Hiatus," New York Times, October 4, 2009

Alas, the hiatus is permanent. I guess they missed their own obituary for him on September 27, 2009. I just read this is in The Sunday New York Times Magazine on page 14 at the bottom of the "On Language" column, which he wrote for years.  The best part is the title of the article that appears above, called "Error-Proof."  Apparently, the Times caught their error, or just have such a long production lead time that it was too late, as the online version indicates:

Postscript: October 3, 2009
MAGAZINE

A note with the “On Language” column on Page 14 this weekend refers to the absence of the regular columnist, William Safire. Mr. Safire died last Sunday, after some copies had gone to press.

I know that print journalism is a tough business, but I did note that the new Economist, which I got in the mail Friday, also had an obituary for Mr. Safire.  Mistakes in life are unavoidable and there is no doing anything without making them, but this one cracked me up because of the name of the article that it appeared under (which is a very nice essay, by the way, on how the obsession with grammatical correctness is a "schoolmarm's hallucination"). I suspect the author, Ammon Shea is a bit horrified by all this, but I hope he also sees the humor and takes heart in that more people will likely read his column as a result.

Netflix Culture: An Amazing Slideshow

This slideshow was on a number of blogs over the summer (see here) , but I wanted to make sure that everyone saw it and, frankly, to get a post here so I have a record of it.  Apparently, Reed Hastings, the amazing CEO of Netflix, put-up a set of 128 slides that is a "reference guide to our freedom and responsibility culture."  I realize that most 128 page slide decks are deadly dull, but this is an exception.  You may not agree with all their values and approaches, but on the whole I think you will be fascinated by the detail and thought.  Now, I have no inside knowledge of what it is like to work at Netflix, but if this is accurate, it is a pretty impressive company -- frankly far more enlightened than most in Silicon Valley. 

They also don't pull any punches, the second slide says that these principles only for salaried employees not hourly. Before laying out their values, they acknowledge that most companies are unaffected by their written values. After laying out their values, they end by saying that a related core value is to question actions that clash with the values. Indeed, that is the real test of any social norm, what happens when someone breaks it?  Are they applauded, do people look the other way, and when people speak-up against the violation do they get slammed?  Or do bosses actually listen and try to make repairs?  Indeed, if you are or were at Netflix insiders, I would love to know if this is hollow rhetoric or a real living and breathing social norm.

 I could go on and on, but this is such an impressive document, you will find many things to get you thinking.  I doubt you will agree with everything -- I didn't, as there was a bit too much emphasis on superstars. Indeed, there was a lot of debate in the comments about that.  Of course, I did love the assertion that, unlike many companies, they would not tolerate brilliant jerks. So it is nice to see another company with an (albeit polite version) of The No Asshole Rule.

Tell me what you think about the deck. I am probably going to assign it next year in my introduction to organizational behavior class and ask the students to write a little on essay on it.

P.S. Thanks to Whitney and Yosem for telling me about this slideshow.

Wal-Mart and Girl Scout Cookies: Thin-Minty Gate

One interesting thing that happened while I was on vacation was the news that Wal-Mart is test-marketing imitations of the two best-selling Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints and Tagalongs.  To get a "flavor" of the reactions to this move, check-out the post that CV Harquail did on her blog Wal-Mart Knocks-Off Girl Scout Cookies.  And see CV's follow-up post Thin-Minty Gate. Over 150 people commented on the first post and this news has spread far and wide.  As regular readers of this blog know, I am biased in this matter because my wife Marina Park is CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts. My view (and I am not speaking for Marina, in fact, I didn't tell her I was writing this post) is that -- holding things aside like ethics, financial damage done to the Girl Scouts, and other things that harm outsiders -- this is a dumb business decision for Wal-Mart, and the real mystery is how the smart people at Wal-Mart (and they are smart and decent human-beings) could do something that:

1. Further fuels their reputation as one of the most heartless and greedy companies on the planet (true or not, they are seen this way in many places).

2. Damages their relationships in communities where they already have stores.  In many of those communities, Wal-Mart works closely with Girl Scouts to provide a place to sell the cookies in front of the store.  The weird dynamic of having very similar cookies sold inside Wal-Mart at a lower price may or may not hurt the cookie sales (because most of us realize that, after all, they are going to a good cause -- allowing girls to go to camp, on trips, buy equipment for learning projects, supporting programs for inner-city girls and those in juvenile detention facilities, to pay remarkably dedicated and modestly compensated staff members, and on and on). But it clearly hurts Wal-Mart, creating the perception that they are going into direct competition with those girls and are acting out of pure greed.

3. Makes it harder to open new stories. It turns out that when Wal-Mart wants to put a store in a community, there is organized resistance in about one third of cases and that, when it happens, this resistance is highly effective: the store is stopped about two-thirds of the time.  So, roughly, Wal-Mart fails to get stores where it wants in over 20% of cases as a result of resistance from communities.  And even when they do overcome the resistance, the fight costs them serious time and money.  In light of these facts, going toe-to-toe with Girl Scouts is sheer idiocy because it provides a compelling rallying cry ("Wal-Mart isn't only going to be competing with the local merchants, they are also going to undercut the Girl Scouts") that increases both the likelihood of resistance and the success. I have no access to the numbers, but I am willing to bet that if Thin Minty Gate results in the failure of even one store opening for Wal-Mart, any profits from the knock-off will not offset the cost of losing that one store.

Perhaps the most interesting question here is how such smart people could do something that is so dumb.  It sounds more like an Onion story that a real story. I don't claim to  have deep or extensive knowledge of Wal-Mart, but we did work with some fairly senior executives from Wal-Mart several years back in one of our d.school classes (see here and here), and I was quite impressed with their action orientation and focus on cost-saving and efficiency.  The brilliance --and the Achilles heel -- of Wall-Mart is that they talk and act as if the answer to every problem is to use their scale, bargaining power, and speedy implementation to tackle any problem by driving down the price they pay and pass it along to consumers.  This is great, for example, when they use their bargaining power to bring down the cost of environmental friendly LED lights in their refrigerators so that they become cheaper than traditional lights.  But when "everyday low prices" is the solution to every problem and -- despite lip service to other constraints -- almost nothing else drives your behavior even when it hurts you badly (as in this cookie caper), your core cultural values can hurt you badly.

As far as I know, Wal-Mart hasn't announced that they are stopping the knock-offs.  My prediction is that they will come-up with some bullshit business reason to do so.  If they were smart (and there is research on this, on how to deal with mistakes, which we talk about in Hard Facts and I touch on  here and here) they would: 1. Confess it was a mistake, that they should have been more sensitive to the importance cookies to Girl Scouts; 2. Explain this episode has made them more sensitive to how pure business decisions need to be considered in light of community relationships and their corporate image; 3. Announce and take formal steps to show they have learned this lesson. 

Let's see what happens.  My experience with Wal-Mart is that these are good people who mean well, they are extremely competent, but sometimes are blinded by their culture -- this appears to be a case where they suffered from a severe knowing-doing gap that could have been averted by simply asking a few objective outsiders to react to what they were doing.   But asking others for honest feedback and listening to them is something that we human-beings often fail to do, despite the best of intentions. 

"Sir, we don't actually do what we propose. We just propose it."

I just ran across an old UPS commercial on YouTube that I sometimes play when I give talks on The Knowing-Doing Gap and how to close the Smart-Talk Trap.  It is quite funny and quite true of many consultants, and I love the punchline: "Sir, we don't actually do what we propose.  We just propose it."  The commercial does a lovely job of making the point that knowledge without action is just as bad as no knowledge at all. I am sorry it is grainy, but I love the content and the acting.

I should also confess that there are times when I am those guys in the commercial  --giving advice that I don't implement.  I do believe that there are times when businesses clients benefit from sound advice that they then implement themselves (Exhibit one here might be W. Edwards Deming's impact on the Japanese auto industry). But there are still too many times in business when people act as if once they hear and talk about a good idea, their work is done even if no one ever actually gets around to testing or implementing it. That is the disease that Jeff Pfeffer and I take aim at in The Knowing-Doing Gap.

Dependicitis

'The situation when no one feels comfortable giving an answer other than "it depends"

This is similar to the "teeter-totter syndrome" in The Peter Principle, defined in their amazing glossary as simply the "inability to make decisions," in fact, I guess dependicitis is a special case -- or root cause -- of the teeter-totter syndrome.

Thanks Xaio!

Dilbert and The Smart Talk Trap: The Dangers of Skilled Bullshitting

One of the main themes on The Knowing-Doing Gap is something that we call "The Smart Talk Trap," that there are too many times in organizations when executives, managers, and other people say smart things instead of doing smart things, and somehow after they have said all the right things, they feel so much better that they believe no other action is necessary or somehow their magical words will turn into action without having to do anything else.  Another variation is when bosses do seemingly brilliant talk, talk that they believe is brilliant too, and then -- because they don't know what they are talking about -- people either resist turning it into action or, when they try, it turns out to be impossible (I recall a stage gate system at one of my client's organizations that was impossible to use.)  Indeed, bad ideas of this last variety helped inspire Jeff Pfeffer and I to write Hard Facts because we kept dealing with organizations where people believed that they were doing the right thing, but we believed it was wrong based on the best evidence-- they suffered from doing-knowing gaps, as we came to call them.

The above cartoon is intriguing because it seems to reflect a case of skilled bullshitting leading to dumb action -- and the bullshitter knows it is dumb.  Dilbert thought it he was talking about garbage, he just threw together a presentation to get through a meeting. Unlike many bosses and others who do this,however, Dilbert realizes his ideas are garbage -- but now it seems they are being acted upon!  The only other thing I've ever heard like this in real corporate life happened with a talking Barney doll at Microsoft.  Here is the story from Weird Ideas That Work -- note that like Dilbert, it was an idea that the team believed was bad from the start, yet somehow it was turned into action.  The extra twist was whether or not the product sucked, it was a commercial success.  This story was told to me in 2000 by Justin Kitch, CEO and founder of Homestead, a dotcom start-up that still exists and apparently was bought by Intuit.  I am also impressed to see that Justin is still CEO, and in fact, most of his founding team is still intact.   I have to learn more about what happened. 

Here is the Barney story:

Right after he graduated from Stanford, Justin went to work for Microsoft in a group that developed educational software for young children.  One day, Justin led a brainstorming session on “What would be the worst product we could possibly build.”  His idea was  “Let’s do that, and think opposite.  Think about what’s the worst characteristics it could have?  What’s the least educational thing we could do?”   The result was  “A talking Barney Doll, it was called Barney 1, 2, 3.  It was a Barney doll that talked to you and taught you numbers.   I still have the drawing.   I made it as a total joke and I gave it to my boss.” 

To Justin’s dismay, Microsoft came out with pretty much the same product a couple years later.  He said  “I couldn’t believe it.  They built exactly what we brainstormed would be the worst possible product.” 

Note that Justin seemed confident that “my team's little chuckle over Barney had nothing to do with the eventual project,” but others I talked to were less sure -- in any event Justin made clear to me that he refused to take any credit for that "piece of shit."  This little incident and Dilbert’s cartoon suggest that you have to be careful who you show your silly ideas to – and in Justin’s case, the lesson is also that ideas that seem dumb may have more merit than you think – at least by commercial standards.

P.S. The phrase "Smart Talk Trap" was actually invented by Suzy Welch, yes Jack's wife, when she was an editor at the Harvard Business Review and worked on a paper based The Knowing-Doing Gap. Suzy was a damn good editor.