Bob Sutton

The Virtues of Standing-Up: In Meetings and Elsewhere

I was thinking back to some of the experiences I had over the last few weeks teaching classes to both Stanford students and executives, and watching some of my fellow teachers and colleagues in action.  I realized that one of the hallmarks, one of the little signs I have learned to look for, is whether people are standing-up or sitting down.  We all learn in school that being a "good student" means that we ought to stay in our seats and be good listeners.  But I kept seeing situations where standing-up was a sign of active learning and leadership.  To give you a a few examples, I noticed that when my course assistants stood up and walked around the classroom, they were more likely to be engaged by students and to create enthusiasm and energy. I noticed that student teams in my classes that stood-up when brainstorming, prototyping, or arguing over ideas seemed more energetic and engaged. 

And I noticed when watching master innovation teacher and coach Perry Klebahn in action at the Stanford d. School that he hardly ever sits down for long, he is always on the prowl, walking over to members of his team to ask how things are going, to give a bit of advice, and to find out what needs to be fixed -- and is constantly walking over to to watch teams of students or executives who are working on creative tasks to see if they need a bit advice, coaching, or a gentle kick in the ass to get unstuck. (In fact, that is Perry listening to David Kelley while they were coaching teams -- David is the d schools main founder).

Of course, there are times when sitting down is best: During long meetings, when you want to unwind, when relaxed contemplation is in order.  But these thoughts inspired a couple questions that many of us -- including me -- need to ask ourselves about the groups we work in and lead: Would it help if I stood up?  Would it help if we all stood up?

This all reminded me of this passage from Good Boss, Bad Boss (from the chapter on how the best bosses "Serve as a Human Shield"):

In Praise of Stand-Up Meetings

I’ve been fascinated by stand-up meetings for years.  It started when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing Hard Facts, our book on evidence-based management.  We often met in Jeff’s lovely house, typically starting-out in his kitchen.  But we usually ended-up in Jeff’s spacious study -- where we both stood, or more often, Jeff sat on the lone chair, and I stood.  Meetings in his study were productive but rarely lasted long.  There was no place for me sit and the discomfort soon drove me out the door (or at least back to the kitchen).  We wondered if there was research on stand-up meetings, and to our delight, we found an experiment comparing decisions made by 56 groups where people stood-up during meetings to 55 groups where people sat down.  These were short meetings, in the 10 to 20 minute range, but the researchers found big differences.  Groups that stood-up took 34% less time to make the assigned decision, and there were no significant differences in decision quality between stand-up and sit-down groups.

Stand-up meetings aren’t just praised in cute academic studies.  Robert Townsend advised in Up the Organization, “Some meetings should be mercifully brief. A good way to handle the latter is to hold the meeting with everyone standing-up. The meetees won’t believe you at first. Then they get very uncomfortable and can hardly wait to get the meeting over with.”

I keep finding good bosses who use stand-up meetings to speed things along.  One is David Darragh, CEO of Reily, a New Orleans-based company that specializes in southern foods and drinks.  They produce and market dozens of products such as Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili, CDM Coffee and Chicory, No Pudge Fat Free Brownie Mix, and Luzianne Tea.  David and I were having a rollicking conversation about how he works with his team. I started interrogating closely after he mentioned the 15 minute stand-up meeting held in his office four mornings a week. We since exchanged a series of emails about these meetings.  As David explains:

“The importance of the stand-up meeting is that it can be accomplished efficiently and, therefore, with greater frequency.  Like many areas of discipline, repetition begets improved results.  The same is true with meetings.  The rhythm that frequency generates allows relationships to develop, personal ticks to be understood, stressors to be identified, personal strengths and weaknesses to be put out in the light of day, etc.  The role of stand-up meetings is not to work on strategic issues or even to resolve an immediate issue.  The role is to bubble up the issues of the day and to identify the ones that need to be worked outside the meeting and agree on a steward to be responsible for it.   With frequent, crisp stand up meetings, there can never be the excuse that the opportunity to communicate was not there.  We insist that bad news travels just as fast as good news”

The team also has a 90 minute sit-down meeting each week, where they dig into more strategic issues.  But the quick daily meetings keep the team connected, allow them to spot small problems before they become big ones, and facilitate quick and effective action.  

Stand-up meetings aren’t right for every meeting or boss.  As we saw in the last chapter in the broken Timbuk2 all-hands meeting, part of the problem with that 45 or so minute gathering was there was no place for most people to sit, which fueled the group’s grumpiness and impatience.  The key lesson is that the best bosses constantly look for little ways to use everyone’s time and energy more efficiently and respectfully.  They keep unearthing traditions, procedures, or other things that needlessly slow people down.  In many cases, these speed bumps have been around so long that people don’t even realize they exist or that they do more harm than good.   Try to look at what you and your people do through fresh eyes.  Bring in someone who “doesn’t know any better,” and ask them: What can I do to help my people travel through the day with fewer hassles? 

What do you think?  How does standing-up help in what you do?  When is it a bad idea?

P.S. Check out this Wall Street Journal article on stand-up meetings as part of the "Agile" software development process, particularly the "daily scrum."

P.P.S. Don't miss Jason Yip's article on how to run a stand-up meeting and how to tell when it isn't going well.

 

A Method For Determining If A Boss Is Self-Aware (And Listens Well)

I was talking with a journalist from Men's Health today about how bosses can become more aware of how they act and are seen by the people they lead, and how so many bosses (like most human-beings) can be clueless of how they come across to others.  This reminded of a method I used some years back with one boss that proved pretty effective for helping him come to grips with his overbearing and "all transmission, no reception" style; here is how it is described in Good Boss, Bad Boss:

A few years ago, I did a workshop with a management team that was suffering from “group dynamics problems.” In particular, team members felt their boss, a senior vice-president, was overbearing, listened poorly, and routinely “ran over” others.  The VP denied all this and called his people “thin-skinned wimps.”

I asked the team – the boss and five direct reports -- to do a variation of an exercise I’ve used in the classroom for years.  They spent about 20 minutes brainstorming ideas about products their business might bring to market; they then spent 10 minutes narrowing their choices to just three:  The most feasible, wildest, and most likely to fail.   But as the group brainstormed and made these decisions, I didn’t pay attention to the content of their ideas.  Instead, I worked with a couple others from the company to make rough counts of the number of comments made by each member, the number of times each interrupted other members, and the number of times each was interrupted.  During this short exercise, the VP made about 65% of the comments, interrupted others at least 20 times, and was never interrupted once.  I then had the VP leave the room after the exercise and asked his five underlings to estimate the results; their recollections were quite accurate, especially about their boss’s stifling actions.  When we brought the VP back in, he recalled making about 25% of the comments, interrupting others two or three times, and being interrupted three or four times.  When we gave the boss the results, and told him that his direct reports made far more accurate estimates, he was flabbergasted and a bit pissed-off at everyone in the room.

As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high status primate in any group:  The creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them. 

My colleague Huggy Rao has a related test he uses to determine if a boss is leading in ways that enables him or her to stay in tune with others.  In addition to how much the boss talks, Huggy counts the proportion of statements the boss makes versus the number of questions asked.  "Transmit only bosses" make lots of statements and assertions and ask few questions. 

What do you think of these assessment methods?  What other methods have you used to determine how self-aware and sensitive you are other bosses are -- and to makes things better?

Hollow Visions, Bullshit, Lies and Leadership Vs. Management

Fast Company has been reprinting excerpts from the new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  The fifth  and current piece 'Why "Big Picture Only" Bosses Are The Worst' deals with a theme I have raised both here and at HBR before: My argument is that, although the distinction between "management" and  "leadership" is probably accurate, the implicit or explicit status differences attached to these terms are destructive. 

One of the worst effects is that too many "leaders" fancy themselves as grand strategists and visionaries and who are above the "little people" that are charged with refining and implementing those big and bold ideas.  These exalted captains of industry develop the grand vision for the product, the film, the merger, or whatever -- and leave the implementation to others.  This was one of Carly Fiorina's fatal flaws at HP: she loved speeches and grand gestures like the Compaq merger, but didn't have much patience for doing what was required for making things work.  By contrast, this is the strength of Pixar leaders like Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, and Brad Bird.  Yes, they have grand visions about the story and market for every film, but they sweat every detail of every frame and worry constantly about linking their big ideas to every little detail of their films.

As Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer show in their masterpiece The Progress Principle, the best creative work depends on getting the little things right.  James March, perhaps the most prestigious living organizational theorist, frames all this in an interesting way, arguing that the effectiveness of organizations depends at least as much on the competent performance of ordinary bureaucrats and technicians who do their jobs well (or badly) day in and day out as on the bold moves and grand rhetoric of people at the top of the pecking order.  To paraphrase March, organizations need both poets and plumbers, and the plumbing is always crucial to organizational performance.  (See this long interview for a nice summary of March's views).

To be clear, I am not rejecting the value of leadership, grand visions, and superstars.  But just as our country and the rest of the world is suffering from the huge gaps between the haves and have nots, too many organizations are doing damage by giving excessive credit, stature, and dollars to people with the big ideas and giving insufficient kudos, prestige, and pay to people who put their heads down and make sure that all the little things get done right.

Our exaggerated faith in heroes and the instant cures they so often promise has done a lot of damage to our society too -- not just to organizations.  In this vein, I wrote a piece in BusinessWeek a few years back after re-reading The Peter Principle.  I argued that the emphasis on dramatic and bold moves and superstars, and our loss of respect for the crucial role of ordinary competence, was likely an underlying cause of the 2008-2009 financial meltdown:

If Dr. Peter were alive today, he'd find that a new lust for superhuman accomplishments has helped create an almost unprecedented level of incompetence. The message has been this: Perform extraordinary feats, or consider yourself a loser.

We are now struggling to stay afloat in a river of snake oil created by this way of thinking. Many of us didn't want to see the lies, exaggerations, and arrogance that pumped up our portfolios. Instead we showered huge rewards on the false financial heroes who fed our delusions. This is the Bernie Madoff story, too. People may have suspected that something wasn't quite right about the huge returns on their investments with Madoff. But few wanted to look closely enough to see the Ponzi scheme.

I am not saying that we don't need heroes and visionaries.  Rather, we need leaders who help us link big ideas to the little day to day accomplishments that turn dreams into realities.   To paraphrase my friend Peter Sims, author of Little Bets, we need leaders who can weave together the "birds eye view," the big picture, with "the worm's eye view," the nuances and tiny little actions required to make bold ideas come to life.

Diego Rodriguez: This is What Leadership Should Look Like at IDEO

As long-time readers of this blog know, I am a big admirer (and long time friend) of Diego Rodriguez.  Diego is a partner at IDEO and runs the flagship Palo Alto office, and he writes the always provocative blog Metacool.   Diego's IDEO colleague, Tatyana Mamut, stopped by Stanford last week to serve as judge for the final project in our course on scaling-up excellence (they were wonderful, but that is another story). 

Somehow, we got to talking about leadership and she told me about a video that Diego had shown people and told them "This is what leadership should look like at IDEO."  Watch it here.  You have to see it, I won't tell you anything else.

I will offer an opinion, however, after years of hanging around IDEO: This is how leadership usually looks there and has since the earliest days when founder David Kelley started a company (with Dean Hovey) in 1978 so he could have a place to hang out with his friends.  But it is always good to remind people of what is sacred (and profane) in any culture, and this little video does it well.

P.S. As a bonus, if you click on the link for Tatyana, you get a great short talk on how tools, rules, and norms and how they explain the spread of deodorant use in Russia.  It reminds of when my dissertation adviser -- Bob Kahn, half jokingly -- defined organizations as "rules, tools, and fools." 

Are Incompetent and Nice Bosses Even Worse The Competent Assholes? An Excerpt from My New Chapter

Tomorrow is the official publication day for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  It contains a new chapter called "What Great Bosses Do," which digs into some of the lessons I learned about leadership since publishing the hardback in September 2010.  I have already published excerpts from the new chapter  on power poisoning,  bad apples, and embracing the mess at Fast Company.

As I am teaching all day tomorrow, I am publishing another here today excerpt here to mark the occasion.  It considers one of the most personally troubling lessons I've learned (or at least am on the verge of believing).  I am starting to wonder, as the headline says, if nice but incompetent bosses are even worse (at least in some ways and at certain times) than competent assholes. 

Now, to be clear, they both suck and having to choose between the two is sort of like deciding whether to be kicked in the stomach or kicked in the head.  And I have even suggested here that there might be certain advantages to having a lousy boss (and readers came up with numerous other great reasons).  But I have seen so much damage done by lousy bosses who are really nice people in recent years that I am starting to wonder...

Here is the excerpt from the new chapter (the 4th of 9 lessons):

4. Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people—journalists, employees,project managers, even a few CEOs—who picked a fight with me. They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human beings; they make sure the job gets done. I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely. Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point— and thought about some lousy bosses—I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.”

As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels. I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip up you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “Nice guys finish last” is sometimes right is that when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors, too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.

People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires. He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important e-mails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront—let alone fire—destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

There are two lessons here. The first is for bosses. If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide
protective armor when things go wrong. Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well
as second and third chances—sometimes even if you are incompetent. I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss—but care as much for others as they do for you—stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers. Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed—or things are falling apart too fast to risk it—the time has come to hit the delete button.

Thoughts?

Great Piece on Narcissistic CEOs in The New York Times

Steve Davidoff has a well-researched piece on the antics and impact of narcissistic CEOs in The New York Times.  The allegations of deeply selfish and unlawful actions by chief executive of Delphi Financial, Robert Rosenkranz, appear to have motivated the piece. Here is just one of the vile acts listed by Davidoff:

Despite restrictions in Delphi Financial’s charter, Mr. Rosenkranz demanded in negotiations that he be paid over $110 million more than other shareholders, a number that a special committee of Delphi Financial’s board negotiated down by about $50 million.

To me, the piece really gets interesting when Mr. Davidof digs into the research, including:

1. Henrik Cronqvis and his colleagues found that the more deeply a company was in debt, the more its chief executive was willing to borrow to buy a house!

2. In another study: "Flying small planes is viewed as thrill-seeking behavior. Professors Cain and McKeon found that chief executives with pilot licenses were more prone to engage in acquisitions, with the theory that takeovers are risky, yet exciting ventures."

This second study reminds me of a hypothesis that Huggy Rao (my co-author of the scaling project) has proposed:  Male CEOs who have "trophy wives" are more likely to lead companies that make risky investments, as having a trophy wife is indicative that the boss had been fooling around at some point (also a risky behavior).

The question that always nags at me when it comes to narcissism and related bad behavior displayed by powerful people is how much of it is provoked in a once decent person who is infected with power poisoning (there is plenty of evidence that this happens, much of which I review in my bossholes chapter in Good Boss, Bad Boss) versus the explanation that giving a selfish and narcissistic jerk a powerful position gives them greater opportunity to reveal their greed and self-absorption. In real life, it is probably some of both.  And the way the organization is structured makes a difference too -- this is one reason why people who study corporate governance often advocate having "checks" on CEO power.

In any case, I thought it was a nice article and it raises all osrts of issues about CEO selection and the structure of executive roles.

The Rise of a Culture of Contempt and the Demise of UCLA Men's Basketball

Work Matters reader and fellow blogger, Chris Yeh, sent me a link to a Sport's Illustrated story about the discouraging downfall of the UCLA basketball program.  And I don't mean the drop off in performance at UCLA in the past few years, I mean the loss of its soul and the rise of a culture of contempt -- with rampant lousy leadership, bad role models, asshole poisoning.  Chris summed it all up well:

It’s terrible.  Thank goodness John Wooden isn’t alive, or this would have killed him.  To trample on his legacy like this is atrocious.

UCLA's John Wooden, the "Wizard of Westwood" not only won more national championships than any coach of a male college basketball team, he fostered a culture of mutual respect and individual development that turned his players -- whether they were superstars like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton or bench-warmers -- into more confident, cooperative, and compassionate human beings.

It appears coach Ben Howland has had the opposite effect.  As you can see in this excerpt from the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback over at Fast Company on the power of subtraction, there is plenty of evidence that when leaders and peers display bad behavior and don't act swiftly and firmly to stop, the vile actions and attitudes spread like wildfire -- and the result isn't just bad performance, it is a culture of contempt that damages everyone involved.

Here is the upshot of the SI story about what happened the last few years under coach Ben Howland:

"Over the last two months SI spoke with more than a dozen players and staff members from the past four Bruins teams. They portrayed the program as having drifted from the UCLA way as Howland allowed an influx of talented but immature recruits to undermine team discipline and morale. Fistfights broke out among teammates. Several players routinely used alcohol and drugs, sometimes before practice. One player intentionally injured teammates but received no punishment."

The story offers many twists and turns, it is long and well-researched.  It provides many old but true lessons about how a bad boss can ruin a good team. If you are a leader of a group or organization of any size, it is worth studying and then taking a long hard look in the mirror and asking yourself -- am I doing that too?  Here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

1.  Are you focusing on strategy, but ignoring your team?

Strategy matters, but it is not enough.  According to the story this was Howland's general management style. He acted as if the human part of his job was a nuisance. As the article explains:

Other than during practices and games, he had little contact with his athletes, according to players. He showed up moments before a workout began and was gone before players paired off to shoot free throws at the end. Several team members say that his approach was how they imagined an NBA coach would run a team.

2. What behavior do you model? 

The SI story reports numerous examples of abusive and disrespectful behavior on his part:

Each of the players who spoke to SI said they found Howland socially awkward and disapproved of the verbal abuse they say he directed at his staff, the student managers and the weakest players. One player said if he saw Howland waiting for the elevator he would take the stairs.

3. Are you so focused on your own needs and wants that you insist that others indulge your little quirks? 

The inner focus that comes with power poisoning can cause leaders to indulge and bizarre and petty behavior that -- even if they are not aware of it -- conveys that they are focused on their own self importance and don't give a hoot about others.  For example, SI reports:

The players were puzzled by some of their coach's idiosyncrasies. Howland seemed obsessed with the temperature in the film room. If it was not exactly 76º a student manager was certain to feel Howland's wrath. The water bottles handed to him had to be just cold enough and not too large.

4. Do you apply different rules to "stars" than to other team members even when they take reprehensible actions? 

The story describes how star freshman Reeves Nelson was repeatedly physically abusive to fellow players in practice. Here is one of a string of such incidents:

Walk-on Tyler Trapani was another Nelson victim. After Trapani took a charge that negated a Nelson dunk, Nelson went out of his way to step on Trapani's chest as he lay on the ground. Trapani is John Wooden's great-grandson.

There are many other examples, but this one is symbolic as Nelson was literally trampling on a body that contained some of Wooden's DNA.  Here is how Howland was reported to have responded to such bad behavior:

After each of the incidents, Howland looked the other way. One team member says he asked Howland after a practice why he wasn't punishing Nelson, to which he said Howland responded, "He's producing."

5. Are you succeeding because the peer culture among your followers is hiding or offsetting your deep flaws? 

This is one of the interesting parts of the story, and something every leader should think about.  In many cases, teams and organizations succeed DESPITE rather than BECAUSE of their leaders flaws.  In Howland's early years at UCLA, when the team was winning and morale among the players was good despite Howland's quirks and flaws, it was apparently due in large part to the tight bonds among the team members, an unusually mature and low ego group (which began unraveling in about 2008):

 It was a team of prefects, the protectors of the UCLA dynamic, who looked out for each other, making sure that no one got into trouble, that no one threatened what they were trying to accomplish or what UCLA has always been about. They were a tight group. If they went out, to the movies or a party, they were 15 strong. That kind of camaraderie is not unusual on good teams, but Howland's former players say he had very little to do with instilling it.

6. Is your boss letting YOU get away with toxic and incompetent leadership?

I was pretty stunned to read this:

UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who through a spokesperson declined SI's interview request, told ESPN.com in January, "I need Ben Howland. Why would I even think about looking at someone else?" He added, "By his own admission, [Howland] made some mistakes. But I'm going to work with him. I'm not going to crucify him for those mistakes. Because Ben Howland is a hell of a coach, and anyone who understands basketball, anyone that's been around him, that knows the game, has the utmost respect for what he does as a coach. ... We need to turn it around, and we all get that. But we will."

The above quote is quite discouraging as it suggests that, well, so long as he goes back to winning, all is forgiven. As far as I am concerned, if the SI story is accurate, Howland suffers too deeply from power poisoning, committed too many selfish sins, and has demonstrated so much incompetence in dealing with people he is hired to look after and motivate to be allowed to continue in any leadership position. 

The problems I've listed only begin to scratch the surface of the damage done under Howland's apparently flawed leadership. I haven't even got into the partying, the players who came to practice still stoned from the night before, and the bench-warmer who couldn't enter a game during "garbage time" because he didn't bother wearing his jersey under his warm-up jacket (the same player now says he can't believe, in retrospect, that he did it -- but bad leadership and bad team dynamics cause people to do weird and dysfunctional things).

Apparently, there are signs that Howland is doing a bit better this year and is taking steps to deal with bad behavior.  Last year, Howland finally stopped putting up with Reeves Nelson's awful behavior -- for example, last season, he finally showed the courage to call fouls on Nelson in practice (in the past, "[Howland] always gave Reeves the benefit of the doubt on foul calls in practice so Reeves wouldn't lose it and be even more disruptive").  Nelson finally was kicked-off the team last November.   And now even Nelson and mother believe Howland should have been nipped the bad behavior in the bud.  As Nelson told SI:

"I'm not trying to make excuses for what I did, but I got into some weird behavior patterns, and I think my mom was saying that if instead of one big punishment at the end, what if there had been smaller punishments along the way."

Perhaps Howland will change his ways.  People do get better and perhaps he will learn to be less of a jerk, be in tune with the people he leads, to avoid letting superstar run roughshod over others, and to do the little bits dirty work when necessary.  I am not especially optimistic, especially after smelling the "winning is the only thing" attitude from Howland's boss.  Regardless, I believe this is a useful cautionary tale for any boss, and in particular, I  think of this guideline in Chapter 1 of The No Asshole Rule:

The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. 

P.S. Note that Reeves Nelson did an interview where he disputes many of the bad things said about him in the article and his law firm is demanding that SI retract the article.

Good Boss, Bad Boss is Shipping in Paperback: A Look Back

 

 

Good Boss, Bad Boss is already shipping in paperback at Amazon, today is the official publication date.  It has a new red cover (which I like, I hope it isn't too intense for you) and a new chapter, an Epilogue called "What Great Bosses Do: Lessons I've l Learned Since Writing Good Boss, Bad Boss."  Fast Company already published an excerpt from the new chapter on power poisoning and will be publishing more snippets in the coming weeks. 

This all got me thinking about Good Boss, Bad Boss, about all the fun I had fretting over and talking with people about ideas in the book, and about lots of others ideas about bosses too, since the book was first published in September, 2010.  In doing so, I looked back on some of the most popular posts and related stories on bosses.  These include:

1. Being a Good Boss is Pretty Damn Hard -- Reflections on Publication Day

2. Lessons from Nightmare (and Dream) Bosses -- INC Interview

3. How to Be a Good Boss -- by Matt May

4. When the Shit Hits the Fan, Women are Seen as Better Bosses than Men

5. Drinking at Work -- It's not all bad -- a piece for Cnn.Com

6. Is it Sometimes Rationally to Select Leaders Randomly?

7. Clueless and Comical Bosses: Please Help Me With Examples

8. A Cool Neurological Explanation for the Power of Small Wins

9. How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything -- a Wall Street Journal piece I wrote

10. What are Good Things About Having a Lousy Boss?

11. Pixar Lore: The Day Our Bossses Saved Our Jobs -- at HBR.org

12. David Kelley on Love and Money

I could have added a lot more -- let me know which ones you like, which ones you don't form the above list, and which ones I should have added from the past six years or so I've been writing Work Matters. Thanks so much for everything

Greetings and Bathrooms: One CEO's Metrics for Retail Stores

Yesterday, we had the CEO of a large retail chain as a visitor in the Stanford class we Huggy Rao and I are teaching on scaling-up excellence.  I will refrain from using his name as this a class, not a speech to the public.  But he said something  interesting in response to a question about the challenge of "descaling bad behavior."  When I asked what the "warning signs" he looked for during store visits, signs that management was slipping, he offered two metrics (which he said could be applied to many others retail settings too):

1.   Am I -- and other customers -- warmly greeted by employees when they enter the store?  He said this was a general sign that employees were focusing on customers.  He added that the small social connection and associated feeling of obligation makes it a bit harder for people to walk out of the store without buying anything. 

2. Are the bathrooms clean?  He joked that people in his company must think he has a small bladder because he is always asking to go the bathroom.  He argued that dirty bathroom are a sign that the managers and employees are failing to execute in other ways, and because customers react so negatively to dirty bathrooms, it was especially bad for motivating sales and return visits.

He said that, when he spots these signs, he immediately has a huddle with the store manager and employees to explain why they are of such concern to him and to persuade them to start changing their behavior right away.  He also emphasized that his firm uses all kinds of quantitative measures to run the stores, but as he pointed out, these simple measures add something that can't be seen just from looking at the numbers.

Ireally liked the elegance of his two measures and how he tied them to his immediate actions.

I wonder, what other simple measures do you use -- as a customer or manager -- to assess if a store is being ran well or badly?

P.S. I was sitting next to a marketing professor from another university during the talk. He argued that if you look at Wal-Mart's recent financial challenges (which the press seems to attribute to such deep cuts in the merchandise prices), part of the problem may be that they are failing along the lines suggested by this veteran CEO.  As he noted, Wal-Mart is eliminating some greeters and moving others away from the entrance; an article in RetailWire comments on reduced and altered use of greeters: "A lot of changes have taken place at Walmart over the years since Sam Walton's passing, but the latest may have him flipping over in his grave. "  That marketing professor also asserted the cleanliness of Wal-Mart bathrooms have slipped in recent years (This is hearsay as I am not a regular Wal-Mart customer; I did try to look online for evidence to support the claim, and while there were individual complaints, I didn't see any systematic evidence one way or another).

Standing on the Sun: Chris Meyer's and Julia's Kirby's Imaginative Masterpiece

About a decade ago, I was talking with Jeff Pfeffer as he raved about Competing for the Future, the 1996 strategy classic written by Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad.  Jeff drives me crazy sometimes -- he  is never wishy-washy anything. But I always listen closely to him because, after all, he is one of the most productive organizational researchers on the planet and one of the three or four most influential organizational theorists of all time.  Jeff argued that the book was so important because it not only contained new and emotionally compelling ideas -- some backed by strong data, others that were important to test with good data in the future -- it contained more intriguing ideas per page than any popular and well-written business book he had ever read.

Well, there is a new book that qualifies for the same praise: Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Will Change Business Everywhere.  The ideas here come rapidly but it is so well-written that you don't realize how thoroughly and intensely you are learning new things and the rate at which your assumptions are being challenged.  I am biased, but I credit Julia Kirby for this rare magic. Chris is a smart guy, but he has never edited me so perhaps I am not giving him enough credit. Julia -- an "Editor at Large" at HBR --  is the best and smartest business writer I have ever worked with.  There are a lot of good editors out there who make your prose and flow better, but Julia is the only one I know who not only makes your ideas better, she relentlessly adds new ones and challenges you with logic and data when she thinks you are wrong or your logic is sloppy. 

Chapter 5 on "Pseudocompetition," for example, unmasks and brings down much of the current hype about size, scale, and competition.  At one point, we hear about a Harvard Business Review author who claimed that "industries were in flux, with many becoming more disaggregated and competitive as many others become more concentrated."  Well, Julia checked the facts, and as the book says "No dice." This guy was largely wrong, something called the Hirschmann-Herfindahl indexes (the gold standard for measuring market power) showed that -- except for a couple "small potatoes" industries -- every other industry is becoming more concentrated.

To get out of the weeds, this is the most complete and creative book I know on how the world economy is changing and what it means for the strategies and tactics that leaders all over the world need to implement.   Reading the book is a compelling journey, as Meyer and Kirby first explain the key features of the new capitalism that is emerging around the world and then provide advice for businesses and leaders in this new world.

I found the "operating principles" developed in Chapter 9 to be especially especially interesting . These include:

Rule One: Learn to See Results in Color

Old formulation: Measure financial returns to shareholders.

New formulation: Measure the real value sought by stakeholders.

Rule Two: Internalize Externalities

Old formulation: Externalize every cost you can.

New formulation: Own your impact, negative and positive.

Rule Four: Give it Away Until You Charge for It

Old formulation: Focus on your particular value-adding capability and outsource all the rest (except where transaction costs are prohibitive).

New formulation: Pursue collaborative gains through invisible handshakes.

The surrounding discussion around these and the other operating rules are wonderful, and each helped me think of the capitalist world we now live in through a new perspective.  Indeed, Rule Four challenges some of the ideas -- or at least translations --  about "core competence" that emerged from Competing for the Future.  And I find Rule Two quite interesting in light of what Apple is learning about the responsibility it needs to take for the alleged mistreatment of employees at supplier Foxconn where wages just went up 25% as well as the environmental impact of suppliers who build their products -- in fact, they just announced environmental audits.   These recent moves by Apple suggest they are stepping up to "own" both their positive and negative impact -- and as Chris and Julia suggest, they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it because it is necessary for protecting Apple's reputation and legitimacy.

Standing on the Sun is not a quick and mindless read.  But if you want an unusually well-written book that is chock-full of new insights about the capitalist world we now live in and about what leaders and businesses can do to survive and thrive in these deeply weird and disconcerting times, this is the book for you.

Eliminating the Negative at the Atlanta Schools

Today's New York Times has a compelling story about the steps new superintendent Erroll B. Davis Jr is taking to clean-up the Atlanta schools, which were tainted by test score scandals -- with teachers and principals cheating in almost half the schools-- that was apparently fueled by pressure and fear created by the previous (and now disgraced) superintendent Beverly L. Hall.  As the Times explains:

"For years, Beverly L. Hall, the former school superintendent here, ruled by fear. Principals were told that if state test scores did not go up enough, they would be fired — and 90 percent of them were removed in the decade of Dr. Hall’s reign.Underlings were humiliated during rallies at the Georgia Dome. Dr. Hall permitted principals with the highest test scores to sit up front near her, while sticking those with the lowest scores off to the side, in the bleachers."

The interesting thing about the story to me is that Davis is behaving in ways that follow directly from one of my favorite academic articles, Bad is Stronger than Good.  He is working to eliminate the negative at every turn, immediately firing a teacher who allegedly supplied test scores students (he says he might get sued, but doesn't care), removing tainted senior administrators at a high rate, and during one of his many visits to schools he observed a toilet was clogged and made sure it was fixed before he left. He has also eliminated practices that Hall used that conveyed her superiority, isolation, and mistrust -- she did things like insisting that all questions be submitted in writing when she spoke in public so they could be screened.

Rather than her "Queen of the Ivory Tower" management style, Davis is out and about in the schools and the community eliminating the negative when he sees it, and as the psychologists who wrote "Bad is Stronger Than Good" advised,spreading around positive words and deeds at such a rapid pace that the negative is overwhelmed.

Most notably, rather than hiding in his ivory tower, he is visiting school after school and thanking everyone he sees for their good work.  And rather than treating teachers as objects of scorn, blame, and mistrust, he says things to principals like “Education is the only industry in this country where failure is blamed on the workers, not the leadership.”

Finally, Davis has made an interesting symbolic change to send the signal that helping kids, not jacking-up tests scores through any means possible, is what matters most.  The Times reports:

"When Dr. Hall was the superintendent, she covered one wall in her office with bar graphs showing the test results for all 100 city schools. After Mr. Davis became superintendent, he took the test scores down and replaced them with large color photographs of Atlanta schoolchildren."

As I noted here recently, my colleague Huggy Rao and I are working on book scaling-up excellence , and teach a related class at Stanford. One of the hallmarks of leaders who scale excellence is that they "make way" for it by removing bad behaviors and emotions that interfere with and turn attention and effort away from doing good things.  The methods that Erroll B. Davis Jr is using to turn around the Atlanta school system don't just provide lessons for other educational leaders, they demonstrate a mindset and actions that leaders of almost any group or organization can use to eliminate the negative -- especially to drive-out fear. 

My Main Focus for 2012: Still Scaling-Up Excellence

I thought I would provide an update about what I am working on these days, and use it to get some ideas and advice from folks who read this blog.

2011 was a year of learning and thinking for me, which was necessary because 2010 was simply wild.  I had open heart surgery in April, Good Boss, Bad Boss was published in September, as was the paperback version of The No Asshole Rule -- both of which became New York Times bestsellers.   I spent 2011 doing a lot of talking, reading, and thinking about two future projects -- they are moving along, but it is always a slow process.  I am lucky to have a job where I don't have to rush to get things out before I am proud of them.

The first project remains in the early stages.  It follows from my focus on the intersection of humanity and performance in the workplace.  I would tell you more, but it is so ill-formed that I changed my mind about the exact focus several times last year and will likely do so several more times. The one thing I can say at this point is that, when I go back to all the stories people have told me about being a boss, working for bosses, and dealing with assholes, two themes come up over and over: 1. How crucial it is for people to feel as if they are treated with dignity and respect and  2. How important it is for people to be able to stand-up for themselves and others, to create conditions that enable dignity and respect, but to do so without being an asshole.   This first project may take years to reach fruition as my main focus now is on the second project -- which fits with my other work on innovation and organizational change.

My Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I have been reading about, talking about and studying "scaling" for several years now -- the challenge of spreading and sustaining actions and mindsets across organizations and networks of people -- of spreading excellence or goodness from the few to the many.  This was my primary focus last year and will continue to be in 2012.  Huggy and I are now making serious progress on a book that digs into the topic.

Every book has a life of its own. This one took awhile to get moving, but it is now dominating our lives.  We seem to be in constant conversation with managers and executives from all kinds of industries about the topic (e.g., in recent weeks we've talked to executives from high tech firms, banks, and the hotel industry; administrators who run prisons; leaders of a big beer company; and school administrators -- this week we are swimming in founders of start-ups), we are teaching a fun and somewhat crazy class with 60 MBA and engineers on scaling-up excellence this term (I will blog more about this in the coming weeks), and the text for the book is now pouring out of our computers slowly but steadily.

Last year, HBR provided summaries of projects that a host of of business and management leaders would be taking on in 2011 -- including me.  The perspective Huggy and I are developing has become more refined and our ideas are now much sharper.  But the  "agenda" piece I wrote about a year ago still captures what we are trying to do pretty well. 

I said our goal was to finish the book in 2011. That didn't happen, but I am optimistic it will this year as we are moving along at a healthy clip. I repeat that description of our project completely (along with comments from the earlier version of this post, published here last year).  We would love any additional comments, suggestions, examples, or other ideas you have:

My Stanford Business School colleague Hayagreeva Rao and I are absorbed by why behavior spreads—within and between organizations, across networks of people, and in the marketplace. We've been reviewing academic research and theory on everything from the psychology of influence to social movements to how and why insects and fish swarm.

We are also doing case studies. We're documenting Mozilla's methods for spreading Firefox (its open-source web browser); the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's "100,000 Lives" campaign (an apparently successful effort to eliminate 100,000 preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals); the spread of microbrewing in the United States; an organizational change and efficiency movement within Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer); and the scaling of employee engagement at JetBlue Airways. And we're examining case studies by others, including the failure of the Segway to scale and the challenges faced by Starbucks as a result of scaling too fast and too far.

Our goal is to write a book in 2011 that provides useful principles for managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who wants to scale constructive behavior. Because we are in the messy middle, I can't tell how the story will end. But we believe we're making progress, and we're excited about a few lines of thought.

The first is the link between beliefs and behavior. A truism of organizational change is that if you change people's minds, their behavior will follow. Psychological research on attitude change shows this is a half-truth (albeit a useful one); there is a lot of evidence that if you get people to change their actions, their hearts and minds will follow.

The second theme is "hot emotions and cool solutions." As Rao shows in his research on social movements, a hallmark of ideas that scale is that leaders first create "hot" emotions to fire up attention, motivation, and often righteous anger. Then they provide "cool," rational solutions for people to implement. In the 100,000 Lives campaign, for example, hot emotions were stirred up by a heart-wrenching speech at the kickoff conference. The patient-safety activist Sorrel King described how her 18-month-old daughter, Josie, had died at Johns Hopkins Hospital as the result of a series of preventable medical errors. Her speech set the stage for IHI staffers to press hospitals to implement six sets of simple, evidence-based practices that would prevent deaths.

The third is what we call the ergonomics of scaling—the notion that when behaviors scale, it is partly because they've been made easy, with the bother of engaging in them removed. In developing Firefox in the early days, Mozilla's 15 or so employees were able to compete against monstrous Microsoft (and produce a browser with fewer bugs than Internet Explorer) by dividing up the chores and using a technology that made it easy for more than 10,000 emotionally committed volunteers to do "bug catching" in the code. Mozilla now has more than 500 employees, but it is still minuscule compared with Microsoft, and those bug catchers are still hard at work every night.

Again, we would love to hear your ideas:  Cases we should dig into, research on scaling and organizational change we should know about, and methods you've used in your organization to scale good behavior and descale bad. We would love to hear it all.

Chip Conley's Emotional Equations: A Leadership Self-help Book You Will Love (Even If You Hate Self-help Books)

Chip Conley is an astoundingly talented human-being, and for me, the very model of a CEO who built an organization that strikes a  balance between performance and humanity, or as IDEO's David Kelley puts it, between love and money. Shortly after graduating from the Stanford Business School, at the age of 26, he started a  25 year quest to build what has become one of America's most successful boutique hotel chains, Joie de Vivre.  It is now some 40 hotels strong -- and each property has its own personality from very first in the chain, the rock and roll themed Pheonix in San Francisco to the upscale and rugged beautiful Ventana Inn located in Big Sur, California.  

I've been lucky enough to get to know to Chip a bit over the past year, and have been struck repeatedly with his rare blend of emotionally sensitivity, business acumen, creativity, and generosity. Last week, we had Chip as a guest at the class on Scaling-Up Excellencee that Huggy Rao and I are teaching this term to business and engineering students at Stanford.  Chip's stories about the method that he uses to develop a distinct brand identity for each property grabbed everyone in the room: They start by picking the magazine that best represents the experience that they want to design for guests, and then develop five words to summarize the feelings that go with it, and then design to that image.  So, at the Phoenix, The Rolling Stone was the magazine they choose; for a more recent property (The Hotel Rex, I think), they choose The New Yorker.  As Chip explained, this simple early choice helps guides hundreds of decisions about everything from the target market for the hotel to the kinds of unexpected delights they offer guests. 

Chip blends this creative capitalism with impressive compassion and caring for his staff.  I was most impressed when he reported that, after September 11 2001 when the hotel business was under siege, especially his hotels (in part, because of the French name -- he got a lot hate mail), rather than shutting hotels and doing layoffs, Chip and his top team decided to take the financial hit themselves and to protect their people the best they could.  Indeed, while his top team top a huge cut, and Chip took a "salary sabbatical" for three years, not a single person was laid-off for lack of work.  Now that is having people's backs!  And much like when Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith defended their people during trying times, the resulting trust, loyalty, and psychologically safety has fueled the growth and spirit of the company.  Chip is still heavily involved in chain, opening new properties and he still has a financial stake, but he sold a majority share of the company a couple years back and is now focused on writing wonderful books and speaking (he is one of the best speakers I've ever seen, if you get a chance, go and see him).  Indeed, Chip started cranking out books when he was still CEO (a tough thing to do). with his most notable past book being Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow.

The main reason I am writing this post is to point you to his new book, Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success. I am not sure I have ever seen a book quite like this, as I could not decide if it was business book or a self-help book when I started reading it. Ultimately, I realized it is both, and for Chip, dealing with and channelling his emotions is the key to his success as a leader and mentor and crucial to whether he travels through his days feeling or bad about himself. 

Chip makes a mighty strong case -- using stories, dabs of research, and the lovely simply equations that fill the book -- to argue there are general principles that we can apply to ourselves and others to be better leaders and humans.   Chip sees himself as "your emotional concierge" and the book as an "operating manual for being a super human being." He doesn't mean becoming superhuman, to him, that is a dangerous goal; rather, he means not allowing your emotions to get the best of you and instead finding ways  "your emotions can represent the best in you."

Chip then presents a series of simply emotional equations and associated stories and advice, things like

Despair = Suffering - meaning

Happiness = Wanting What You Have/Having What You Want

Regret = Disappointment + Responsibility (think about that one)

Authenticity = Self-Awareness x Courage

Wisdom = The Square Root of Experience

I know, it seems silly on the surface.  I frankly hesitated to read the book because I hate self-help books (being a psychology major for 10 years has made me cynical about them).  Despite that, I just couldn't resist once I started reading the thing.  The way that Chip frames these formulas, links them to the daily struggles every leader --  and every other person -- faces as they try to navigate through life, is done in such a compelling and helpful way that the result is the kind of read  (and a weird from of useful therapy) that simply doesn't exist in any book I know.  I am not the only one who is enjoying this book -- it is already on The New York Times bestseller list.

In the name of full disclosure, I did grow-up in California and I am a big fan of Chip's; but anyone who knows me will tell you I am the least "new age' guy you will ever meet.  So you might be as surprised as I was by how instructive and comforting it was to read Chip's delightful and quirky book.

P.S. If you want a fun and quite accurate summary of the book's main idea, check out this "book trailer."

New CEO Studies: Nuances of Narcissism, Flattery, and Opinion Conformity

I got my copy of the Administrative Science Quarterly in the mail the other day. You can see the cover to the left, it is famous for pretty pictures like this one by Signe Pike, whose mother Linda Johanson is the managing editor (and has been for at least 30 years I can recall).  I was one of two associate editors for four years in the 90's and, although I liked doing it in many ways because the work was challenging and I especially liked working with Linda, the weight of having to write over 100 decision letters a year on papers (which would be sent out for evaluation by three anonymous peers first) eventually wore me down. 

Academia is petty and I can be touchy, so I got especially tired of the hostility from people who got papers rejected as many academics have big egos and turn hostile in the face of rejection (ASQ is the most prestigious organizational research journal and rejects over 90% of papers submitted.   It is so picky that it has been running late for years -- note the June 2011 issue just came out this week.  But the quality is always very high.).  There is even one author who is still mad at me because some 15 years later because, even though we accepted his paper, we wouldn't let him publish it until he fixed his lousy writing.   I never thought I would be teaching freshman English to an Ivy League professor, but he needed it.

The journal has been in good hands in recent years, with the last editor being my scaling co-author Huggy Rao from Stanford and the new editor being Gerald Davis from  The University of Michigan (who I worked with when he was a Stanford student 20 years ago or so). 

Perhaps because I had just wrapped-up a doctoral seminar on leadership, there were two articles that really caught my eye.  I wasn't shocked by the findings, and you likely won't be either, but was pleased with the rigor.  The three studies from two articles were done in different ways, but the upshot is that CEOs are swayed heavily by praise and ass-kissing of all kinds, especially narcissists, and the effects aren't pretty. In short:

If you are a CEO, these studies show how hard it is for you to wade through and tune out all the bullshit and ass-kissing that come with the job.  Those flattering stories that the press wants to write about you are dangerous to your organization's health -- especially if you are narcissist, but even you are not. And all that insincere ass-kissing and agreement from your board and your management team may help them get ahead, but can hurt you and your company. It can fuel an inflated self-assessment of your skills, cause you to cling to failing strategies, hurt your firm's long-term performance, and cost you your job.

I offer more details about these studies if you want to learn more; if all you want is the headline, I suggest you stop here.

The first was by Arijit Chatteerjee and Donald Hambrick, which compares highly narcissistic CEOs to to their less narcissistic peers in two studies. The first was a sample of 152 CEOs from 134 computer hardware and software firms.  I loved their measures of narcissism: how prominently the CEO was pictured in the annual report; the number of times the CEO's name was mentioned in the typical press release; and the difference in compensation (both cash and non-cash) between the CEO and the next highest paid executives.  They argue this measure is reliable and valid because these items were fairly highly inter-correlated (.71 was the Cronbach's alpha for measurement geeks) and they also had a panel of experienced security analysts rank 40 of the CEOs in terms of narcissism, which further supported their ranking method.  

The findings of this first study focus on how narcissism appears to serve as a filter for outside cues.  The highly narcissistic CEOs were less responsive to whether recent firm performance was good or bad -- they tended to continue to make equally risky investments (more risk was indicated by spending more money on R&D, big capital expenditures, and acquisitions of new companies) regardless of recent performance.   In contrast, their less narcissistic peers became more cautious in bad times and tended to take bigger risks during good times.  The most interesting finding was about media praise.  The less narcissistic CEO's weren't affected much by media praise, but the highly narcissistic ones tended to make considerably riskier investments after getting praised in the media.

So the upshot is the narcissists were swayed more  by "social praise" and less by recent performance!

Their second study dug into something called "acquisition premiums," the well-documented tendency for companies to overpay when they buy another company.  This was measured by comparing the acquired company's stock price four weeks before the acquisition was announced to what it was finally sold for.  The authors used a different sample of 131 big acquisitions (over 100 million) across diverse industries, and measured narcissism the same way as in the first study.  They found some interesting parallels to the first study: Recent media praise tended to have a stronger effect on the acquisition premiums paid by highly narcissistic CEOs.  A single flattering article was associated with paying a 7% larger  premium among the less narcissistic  CEOs (28% versus 35%) and a 14% premium (29% versus 43%) among the highly narcissistic CEOs.

In short, this research suggests that most companies pay big acquisition premiums, that recent media praise makes it even worse for all CEOs, and especially worse for narcissists.

The second article, which I will describe more briefly, is by Sun Hyun Park, James Westphal, and Ithai Stern. It looked at the impact suffered by CEOs who are surrounded by people who engage in (relatively) more intense and frequent flattery (e.g., offering exaggerated compliments) and opinion conformity (e.g., expressing agreement even when they don't quite agree) as measured by surveys of their board members and top managers.  These very persistent researchers managed to gather these kinds of data about 451 CEOS.  The findings probably won't surprise you much:

More flattery and opinion conformity was linked to CEOs having more favorable evaluations of their own strategic judgments and leadership skills, being less likely to make strategic changes when firm performance suffered (just like the narcissists in the first study), and more to prone to lead firms that suffered persistently poor performance.  The authors also present suggestive evidence that flattery helps bring down CEOs in the end, that it not only is linked to weaker long-term firm performance, it increases the chances that those very same ass-kissing board members are going to fire the CEO when things turn south.

James Westphal and his colleagues have published many studies like this one that show how the social psychology of CEOs, boards, and top teams color their behavior in often discouraging ways.  For example, an earlier study by these folks suggests that engaging in flattery is a smart personal strategy for board members want to gain additional lucrative appointments, as ass-kissing is associated with getting more board memberships -- especially for white males, but not so much for women and minorities!

As I said at the outset, none of this will likely surprise you.  But it adds further fuel for skeptics who argue that CEOs are at least as irrational as the rest of us. 

Taken together, this research provides lots of evidence about how boards and top management teams ought to act when selecting and dealing with CEOS and about the hazards that  CEOs face -- and hints about why it is so hard for both CEOs and those who oversee them to do the right things.  The headline for me is that praise and flattery often benefit those who provide it, but can be dangerous to those who recieve it.

Inside Apple: Adam Lashinsky Revealing and Well-Crafted Book

Last week, I opened up my copy of Adam Lashinsky's new book, Inside Apple.   It was about 8 at night, and I figured I would read the first chapter and do something else.  Well, I looked-up, and it was 1:30 in the morning, and the book was done.  Frankly, a business book hasn't grabbed me like that in a long-time.   Adam not only writes well, he provides the most complete picture you can find of how Apple actually is organized, how they divide-up the work, the pecking order, the mindset -- the kind of stuff that people like me who are interested in organizations want to know.

This is not an authorized book like Isaacson''s blockbuster Steve Jobs.  But Adam has been following Apple for many years as a reporter at Fortune, and before that, at the San Jose Mercury. He did many interviews with former Apple employees, and although it is unclear how much access that Apple allowed him (and knowing Apple, he likely isn't allowed to say), I can tell you that I've talked to several journalists over the years who have complained that he gets better access than the rest of them. He also does a great job of capturing the complexity and hypocrisy of the place.  I especially loved this paragraph late in the book, on page 175:

Apple is company of paradoxes. Its people and institutional bearing are off-the-charts-arrogant, yet at the same time, they are genuinely fearful of what would happen if their big bets go bad.  The creative side of the business that was dominated by Steve Jobs is made up of lifers or near lifers who value only an Apple way of doing things -- hardly the typical creative mind-set. The operations side of Apple runs like any company in America, but better, and is led by a cadre of ex-IBMers, the cultural antithesis of Apple.  Apple has an entrepreneurial flare yet keeps people in a tightly controlled box, following time-tested procedures. Its public image, at least seen through its advertising, is whimsical and fun, yet its internal demeanor is cheerless and nose-to-the grindstone.

Good stuff, huh? I was interested in Adam's opening arguments that Job's was a productive narcissist, which he linked to Michael Maccoby's Narcissistic Leaders and to The No Asshole Rule a bit too.  Many other things about the book were interesting, but three especially stood out for me, and reinforced my beliefs (and now some concerns) that I voiced in my post last year 5 Warning Signs to Watch for at Apple:

1.  Apple is nearly the exact opposite of the kind of organization hyped by people like Gary Hamel and even Peter Drucker.  It is centralized, secretive, fear-ridden, punitive, and not much fun for most people who work there.  But it works because the pieces of the "organizational design" fit together, or at least did fit together when Jobs was there, in an elegant way.  The secrecy is so severe that, when products are launched, even senior people are surprised by the final product because people are on a strictly "need to know" basis.  But this is offset with a system of roles and responsibilities -- and crucial to all of it-- is what Apple calls the DRI, the directly responsible individual, a centerpiece of the organization.  There is clear responsibility placed on individuals, not so much on groups and committees.  Although groups and some committees do exist, the DRI can always be found and is where attention is focused.  Which means that that it is clear where to go to provide guidance, to integrate their work with others, and who will be fired, blamed, and replaced -- and celebrated too. 

Essentially, and you can see this in the organization chart on one of the first pages of the book, Apple is designed so that all major (and many minor) decisions are made by a very small group of people, they are not influenced much by suppliers, customers, 99.9% of employees or anyone else; rather is what my friend John Lilly calls a "genius driven" organization.  So, with Jobs gone, the question on the table is if the brilliance of CEO Tim Cook and a few others like Jonathan Ive (head of design) and Scott Forstall (head of IOS software) can sustain the firm's dominance and creativity. These are mighty smart people and they have been slowly weaned from Jobs as he was so sick for so many years.  But the design of the organization places more pressure on senior executives doing the right things than any large company I know.

In contrast, other organizations have decentralized systems where numerous semi-autonomous businesses are responsible for their own profits and losses, and top executives are essentially managing a portfolio.  HP operated quite successfully this way for decades under Hewlett and Packard.  The had numerous divisions (I recall about 45 when I first got to Stanford in 1983), and it was run by what some insiders called the "mafia model:" if  your business was sufficiently profitable (around 10% net profit per year as the going rate as I recall), you simply paid that "protection money" to  corporate, and you could do whatever you wanted within reason.  If your numbers were lower, you would get "help," and if they didn't improve or if senior management lost faith in you, you were removed.  Certainly, this kind of structure places pressure on leaders to prune, merge, and start new businesses --and to deal with overlaps and conflicts between businesses -- but such a structure spreads the leadership chores -- and risk -- among multiple teams, each of which acts with great autonomy.  (Google is much more decentralized than Apple, for example, but is moving to become more centralized.  For example, when Larry Page took over as CEO, they had so many products done by so many different decentralized groups he went to Wikipedia to get a list of them all--and then he and his team started trimming them).

My point here, and this follows an old conceptual perspective called "contingency theory," is that other organizations that want to be like Apple --and that seems like so many now -- need to be especially careful about copying individual pieces, because the reason it works is that the multiple elements fit together. 

2.  I am very impressed with how thoughtful Apple's team is about allowing people to focus on what they are doing, and to not be distracted by so many of the other things that most organizations expect from their people. They don't believe in the concept of general managers.  They don't give groups or businesses P&L's... there is only one, that is for the whole company.  They focus on saying "no."   As Adam quotes Jobs, his "Focus is not saying yes. It is saying no to really great ideas."  This "elegance is refusal" philosophy is extended to strategy and organizational design as well.  There are simply a lot things that weigh on many managers and employees at other places that aren't present or are less present at Apple.  Managers aren't asked to be responsible for a local P&L, they know amazingly little about what is going on in other parts of the company, they aren't asked to go to as many meetings or be on as many committees and are instead expected to do what they do perfectly and as little else as possible. 

This focus on simplicity and reduction of load is also seen in the emphasis on keeping teams as small as possible. The tendency to make teams ever bigger is an awful disease, not so much because it costs more money, but because, as Harvard's J.Richard Hackman has shown, it slows teams and undermines their performance as members end-up spending more time dealing with coordination issues and coalitional battles and less time doing the work at hand.  Apple gets the importance of small teams at all levels (e.g., Adam reports that a 2 person team "wrote the code for converting Apple's Safari browser for the iPad, a massive undertaking”).  They also have an unusually small board of directors -- seven members -- for a company of that size.  

This extension of the elegance philosophy beyond their products has huge advantages as the "signal to noise" ratio appears to be quite impressive at all levels and in all functions -- people tend to get good information, the information they need (and no more), and aren't confused or distracted by other things.  At senior levels, this means they get the information they need and it means that, although there is discussion and debate at times, when a decision is made, there is less of the usual arguing or undermining.    And if there are failures in implementing, you will be forgiven if senior executives believe you acted intelligently enough and hard enough, but you will be shown the door very quickly if they believe you were dumb or lazy.

3.  Adam did a great job of describing the company with all its warts and negative side-effects.  I was struck by how Apple is a place that is driven by the pride of doing great work, that it was not about having fun.  That it is was also not about getting rich for most employees. Apple pays competitive salaries for Silicon Valley,  but not at the very top of the market like NetFllix.  And only a few employees who were in early made big fortunes from the stock.  In fact, Jobs hated talking about money.

 My personal reaction, and others no doubt have different motivations and preferences, is that it would be an awful place to work.  The extreme secrecy means there is extreme paranoia.  It means you often don't even know a lot of co-workers, let alone what they are working on -- and if you ask them, you can get in big trouble.  Fear is everywhere.  Apple seems to take pleasure in pushing around other companies -- competitors, suppliers, and those that just get in the way -- just because it can.  And, let's face it, while Jobs was one of the most effective assholes in history, he was still an asshole (Isaacson reported he went through over 70 nurses before finding 3 he liked).   I worry that the bully worship that has emerged in the wake of Jobs death has not only apparently been long institutionalized at Apple, it is now being imitated and gloried by people who lack Jobs' obsessive genius and who are not embedded in an a system that is designed to amplify the best qualities of a obsessive perfectionist and to dampen the worst.

Jobs said the journey is the reward, a nice sentiment, and I like the pride, thirst for excellence, and action orientation that Adam describes, but spending my days deep in fear, paranoia, and secrecy isn't for me. Life is too short.

In any case, if you can't get a job at Apple or don't want to, Inside Apple provides the best -- most complete and balanced -- coverage of how the place works, the elements you might want to copy, and those that you might avoid -- that Apple has apparently succeeded DESPITE rather BECAUSE they are used. 

Taking People With You By David Novak: Great Read and Most Useful

Most books by sitting CEOs seem like they are pure fluff pieces, or worse, pure vanity projects.   As such, when I was contacted by a Penguin publicist about having a chat with David Novak, CEO of YUM! Brands about his new book, Taking People With You, I jumped at the chance to talk with him because he is so experienced and successful at scaling --Yum Brands! includes Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC -- which what Huggy Rao and I are currently studying.  But I didn't expect much from the book. To my surprise, after spending a good hour and half with the book in anticipation of the conversation, I was stunned by how good it is -- Novak really digs into the details of what he does to sustain, grow, and keep improving this huge company, and how any boss can learn from what he and his colleagues do.  

The reason the book rises above most others of the genre is that it is based on a program that Mr. Novak teaches himself about eight times a year to people at YUM!, which is also called Taking People With You.  This book is based on that program, so it contains many of the specifics from this program, which as he told me, he has refined over the years as he teaches it about 8 times a year and, so far, it has involved about 4000 people from YUM! The three overall sections are: Get Your Mindset Right, Have a Plan: Strategy, Structure, and Culture, and Follow Through to Get Results.   These headlines are typical, and certainly not original, but once I started digging into how the book deals with them, I was very impressed with the detail, and specific suggestions, and how each chapter contains such specific and useful tools. Consider a few "picture step-by-step change," "choose powerful versus limiting mindsets," "get to know people," "get whole brained," and there are self-assessment tools throughout.   I argued in Good Boss, Bad Boss that the key to effective leadership, and one of the hardest things for any leader to achieve is self-awareness, knowledge of ones strengths and weaknesses and being in tune with what it feels like to work for you.  Taking People With You impressed me so much because it shows how to become more self-aware as a leader, and spotlights the specific skills that every leader needs to be effective.

As for Mr Novak, I found him quite delightful, straightforward, and most efficient.  I was especially struck with a few things he emphasized. First, when I asked him how he spent his time, he answered that developing great leaders in the company was his number one priority.  Unlike so many companies who turn this responsibility over to professional trainers or worse yet outside vendors, Mr. Novak has developed and taught the Taking People With You workshop himself to 4000 people, and is now "cascading" it so his senior executives will teach it to others as well, so the plan is to touch 35,000 people in the company. 

Second, when I asked him about bad behavior (as readers of this blog know, I have written quite a bit about how "bad is stronger than good"),  he had a great line, something like: "We are a company that believes in recognition, and that means recognizing both good and bad behavior."  When I asked for an example, he said that YUM! "is not the place for you if you think that you are better than everyone else."  He argued this is especially important to the company, because if managers and leaders see themselves as better than the people who work in their stores or better than their customers, then it undermines their ability to understand customer's and employee's motivations and needs, and it causes them to keep their distance from people they should be interacting with and listening carefully to every day.  (Note I was especially struck by this because I am reading Adam Lashinsky's wonderful new book Inside Apple, which certainly is a different culture, as it Apple appears to be a place where people are more or less required to think of themselves as better than others.  I will write something on Inside Apple  later in the week.)

Third, Mr. Novak also had some interesting thoughts on what he called "the tensions between centralization decentralization," and he argued that one of the keys to YUM!'s success -- which is doing incredibly well in China and other international markets -- is that, while there are multiple non-negotiable elements of the culture (I like "Be Restaurant and Customer Maniacs... Now!), they err on the side of decentralization. He emphasized this meant that in places like China and India, the country team is made-up of mostly locals who understand the culture and it meant customizing menus for local tastes such as selling more desserts in France and having more vegetarian choices in India. I was quite interested to hear him talk about this approach, because as we are studying scaling, this tension between having a core set of principles and a shared mindset in concert with the need to give people enough decision-making power to adapt to local conditions is something that comes up again and again, whether we talk to someone like David who is opening thousands of restaurants in China or a chef in San Francisco who has just opened his second restaurant that is in a much different neighborhood than the first.

Once again, Taking People With You with is a good read and is especially impressive because it is the rare leadership book that contains specific steps you can take to become more aware and more skilled at your craft.

Why Bosses Who are Civilized and Caring, But Incompetent, can be Really Horrible

I haven't been blogging much the last couple weeks because, in addition to the usual madness that goes with the holiday and start of the term, I have been wrapping up a new chapter for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback, which will appears March 15th (but I suspect will be shipping before that, Amazon usually does).  Above is the new cover, which I quite like because it stands out and is now more distinct from The No Asshole Rule. 

I had planned to write just a few pages for the Epilogue, but once I took the time to think about what I had learned since Good Boss, Bad Boss was published, I became rather obsessed and wrote a lot of text.  As my editor Rick Wolff wisely advised, I trimmed back the original draft quite a bit, but it still runs about 8,000 words. The opening looks back on the experience and devotes special attention to Luiz Uruza, the boss of the trapped Chilean miners (who I first wrote about at Psychology Today.)  and was interviewed about on CNN International.  I then present new nine lessons I've learned or come to believe in more strongly about what it takes to be a great boss. 

To give you a taste, I thought you might like to see the fourth lesson (warning, this will be copy-edited, so it may read slightly different when it is published, but the point will remain the same):

4.  Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people – journalists, employees, project managers, even a few CEOs – who picked a fight with me: They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human-beings; they make sure the job gets done.  I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely.   Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point – and thought about some lousy bosses – I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.” 

As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels.  I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip-up, you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. 

In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “nice guys finish last” sometimes right is that, when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.  People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires.  He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important emails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront -- let alone fire -- destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

There are two lessons here.  The first is for bosses.  If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide protective armor when things go wrong.  Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well as second and third chances – sometimes even if you are incompetent.  I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss – but care as much for others as they do for you -- stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers.   Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed -- or things are falling apart too fast to risk it -- the time has come to hit the delete button.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree? What did I leave out?  How do you deal with one?  And, following my recent post, are the advantages to working for one of these lovable losers?

What Are Good Things About Having A Lousy Boss?

I have a weird question for Work Matters readers, one I've been fretting over for a couple weeks. 

What are some GOOD things about working for a BAD boss?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this odd question.  Here is the story of how it came about.

About two weeks back, I enjoyed a long dinner with a couple good friends of mine -- whose names must be kept anonymous given the facts that follow.  I generally like to name names, but in this case, I will not out them and will also omit identifying information (and change a couple key descriptions) to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

To get back to our dinner, we were among the first people at the place and the last to leave because we were having so much fun talking many different topics -- why incremental innovation is sometimes under appreciated (well, not in China... and look how they are doing) and why breakthrough innovations are overqualified, how the best way to influence your spouse is through your kids rather than directly, and why the 130 proof bourbon that the bartender gave us to try was a cool idea -- especially because the ice cubes sink in it -- but too much like drinking lighter fluid for our tastes. 

But this blog post is about the topic we kept coming back to, the idea that, well, bad bosses aren't all bad.  Of course, we all had suffered through bad bosses, and had seen them do all kinds of damage.  BUT -- and this the thread I thought I would raise here -- during the course of the conversation, we all started realizing that a bad boss -- especially the kind who doesn't really have the power to hurt you very much -- can be a great thing in some ways.  The notion that you can learn a lot about what NOT to do from a bad boss has been around for decades . A charming version of this argument is in Robert Towsend's classic Up The Organization, where he asserts that much of what he learned about being a good boss came from working for such awful bosses at American Express early in his career.

The focus of our conversation about bad bosses, however, turned a different direction that I am still fretting over.  One of my friends had just ended a long stint working for a lousy boss, one who could be a selfish asshole at times and was a legendary backstabber and narcissist.  He talked about how great it was that this selfish jerk had been removed from his management job and was now working a line job again, and how his new boss was thus far amazing -- selfless, open, always thinking about was good for his group rather than himself, listening all the time, practicing constant empathy. This guy could be the poster child for Good Boss, Bad Boss.

Then, my other friend chimed in and talked about how he wished he had such a boss because his current boss was so lame.  She was inept in many ways, especially committing sins of omission: not going to meetings she should, not answering emails no matter how important, not following through on commitments, not jumping into help his team when she said she would, not having the guts to deal with performance problems, not reaching outside of the organization to develop a stronger network, and perhaps worst of all, constantly spending time planning and talking and brainstorming -- but pretty much being unable or unwilling to actually get anything done.  This boss could be the poster child for The Knowing-Doing Gap.

Then, however, the conversation took an interesting turn that still gnaws at my mind. The guy with the good boss said to the one with the bad boss "Be careful what you wish for, I got the great boss I want, and it has disadvantages."

He went on to explain that, when he had that inept boss, he felt obligated to take only minimal steps to help his organization.  He did everything he could to avoid contact with his boss -- and would never lift a finger to help that asshole succeed.  He wasn't the only one in his group who reacted that way: Alienation was high and the commitment was low throughout.  But he didn't just mess around at work. He devoted his energy to developing a big book of business and for developing a great reputation among clients.  In other words, and this is the key point, he was treated sufficiently badly by his boss (as were others), that he felt free to act largely in his self-interest.

BUT with this new and nearly model boss, he and many of his colleagues are spending much more time working to help the organization in all sorts of ways -- to recruit new people, to repair broken procedures, to attend every group meeting, to develop business that helps the organization and not necessarily themselves.  As a result, he is spending far less time doing things that benefited only him, and as a result, not only is making a bit less money, he is having less fun too. He now feels compelled to do things that he doesn't like to benefit his group and organization -- because he respects and admires his boss so much, and didn't want to let him down.

Then, we started quizzing my friend who still had the bad boss.  Our friend has become a total star in recent years.  The work his team does is bringing in a third of the group's revenue, he has freedom to do what he wants, his boss is rather afraid of him so almost never tells what to do, he is making a lot of money, and -- while he is still doing many things to help his group succeed -- he is far more respected both inside and outside the organization than his boss.  As my friend with the new good boss warned him, if you got your dream boss -- or worse yet they gave you your bosses job -- you might feel great in some ways.  But your life would change for the worse in other ways.  You would start doing more things that benefited your organization that were not in your pure self-interest, you would spend more time doing things to help others that you would rather not do, you would go to more meetings with people who are of no interest to you --and even dislike -- because doing so was for the greater good.

The conversation went back and forth in this vein for awhile, and although all three of us still believe that bad bosses suck on the whole, we started wondering if a more general, elaborate, and evidence-absed argument might be made about the upsides of working for a loser.  In this post, there are some hints:

1. You can learn what NOT to do.

2. If you just have ordinary competence, you look like a genius compared to your boss.

3.  You don't feel compelled to waste time doing extra things that help your group and organization.  After all,  if they aren't doing much for you or are treating you badly (via your boss), why should you do anything to help them?

3. Your boss is so inept at implementation that it isn't worthwhile going to meetings, generating ideas, or suggesting now paths the organization might take. None of it will happen in anyway, so why waste your time?

4.  A lousy boss probably needs you more than a good boss -- and thus you may have power -- because you keep bailing him or her out, bringing in money or clients that he or she is too inept to do, and performing other competent acts that protect the boss and make the boss look better than he or she really deserves.

5. If the boss leaves (perhaps is fired -- but in too many organizations lousy bosses get promoted), and you get the job, people will think you are brilliant because of the power of psychological contrast. (I am cheating here, as this is really about an advantage of taking a position last held by a horrible boss).

I am partly having fun here and partly serious.  Yet as we talked about the good and bad bosses my friends had, and other bosses we had known and worked for, we realized that there are some perhaps under appreciated advantages to having a bad boss.  I am not sure how far to take this, but for now, perhaps we could have some fun. Let's try a little thought exercise and look at the same thing as everyone else, but to try to see it differently.

So, once more, I want to hear from you:

What do you think? What are some other advantages of working for lousy boss?

The Power Of The Roles We Take: A Very Old Study And Related Thoughts

I recently had a rather painful meeting with a group of friends that I all admire.  I need to keep things vague to protect both the guilty and the innocent. But I was amazed -- perhaps flabbergasted is a better word -- to see how my friends who had taken and devoted enormous energy to their leadership roles couldn't help but defend their every move.  They denied problems that seemed obvious and when they could bring themselves to actually acknowledge a glaring problem,  they minimized its impact and quickly turned conversation to how minor this problem was compared to all the other truly wonderful things they were doing.  

Then it hit me.  Well, of course, I know why this is happening.  As numerous psychology studies show,  people generally have self-serving biases, are motivated to present positive and flattering self-images (to themselves and others), and the roles we play in life are so powerful that they can quickly overwhelm our ability to process information objectively and can reverse any previously critical or negative views we once had about those roles. 

The lesson, of course, is that we all need to be very careful about the roles we take in life -- the organizations we join and lead, the kinds of people we hang out with, and the like -- because even if don't like the people and the values they represent, and perhaps just take a job because we need or want that job -- odds are that we will become more (or much) like the people we are around and the values associated with the positions we hold. 

 In particular, I was reminded of a very old study called "The Effects of Changes in Roles on the Attitudes of Role Occupants," which was published by Seymour Lieberman in Human Relations in 1956. The study was fascinating in that Lieberman was able to gather data during a "naturally occurring experiment" where people who worked in a manufacturing company switched roles -- in some cases moving from a worker to foreman and in other cases, moving from a worker to a union steward.   The numbers were not large, only some 58 people changed roles.  But the magnitude of the effects were quite large, especially among the new foremen. They changed their attitudes markedly, turning pro-management, pro-company, and anti-union within 6 months of taking their new jobs.  For example, 70% of the new foremen reported seeing the company as a better place to work than the did when they were workers, while only 26% had no change in opinion. 74% believed that the union should have less say in setting standards than they did when they were workers.  And on and on. The new union stewards also expressed stronger pro-worker and pro-union sentiments than when they had been workers, but the effects were not as pronounced. 

Then, there was an interesting twist that Seymour Lieberman took advantage of; as a result of a downturn, about a third (8) of the 23 workers  who had been promoted to foremen were then demoted to workers, while the other two-thirds remained foremen.  The numbers here are very small, and while modern studies have replicated related findings with more rigor, it is still interesting to see that the 8 workers who returned to being workers soon developed pretty much the same anti-management and pro-union sentiments as their fellow workers; but those who remained as foreman retained their pro-company and pro-management attitudes.

I am writing about Lieberman's old study partly for sentimental reasons, as it was done at The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, where I hung out and sometimes worked as a doctoral student.  It was was one of the first research papers I ever read about the power of roles and how they can erase and reverse opinions and attitudes that we believe are core parts of who we are and aspire to be.  

My old warm memories aside, there have since been many other studies on the power of situations to overwhelm our personalities and attitudes (indeed, you could argue that the power of situations over personalities is an assumption that drives many if not most experiments done by psychologists). Again, the lesson is that we all need to be very careful of the roles we take and realize that they will probably change us more than we change them -- I am not trying to be fatalistic, but this is an evidence-based statement.  Sometimes this is a good thing, especially when we join a group composed of noble and skilled human-beings.  But every manager and leader out there ought to be aware that no matter how self-critical and self-aware you might be, the very act of taking leadership role will likely make you defend and support your organization more vehemently than the facts likely justify.   At moderate levels of reality distortion, this probably isn't a bad thing as it instills confidence in yourself and others.  But the damage can be severe when you and your company are screwing-up royally, and you can't see the flaws or any good reason to make repairs.

Bad is Stronger than Good: Why Eliminating the Negative is More Important than Accentuating the Positive

I  had a piece appear today in the Wall Street Journal called "How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything," a topic I have written on before and her, especially, in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A fun discussion of bad apples can also be found on This American Life; check out the opening interview of this episode with Will Felps, who has done some cool research on how bad apples have a disproportionately negative effect on group performance. 

The underlying theory and evidence for my argument that bad apples do so much damage, and more broadly destructive emotions and incompetence undermine performance and well-being so much, that the first order of business for any boss is to eliminate the negative rather than accentuate the positive (I am not discouraging goodness and excellence... but getting rid of the bad is importance for achieving greatness).  This perspective is inspired by a masterpiece of an academic article called "Bad is Stronger Than Good," which was published in 2001 by Roy F. Baumeister and three other colleagues. If you want to really dig in, I invite you to download Bad is Stronger Than Good.. it is very detailed but readable.

Essentially, the authors meticulously go through topic after topic -- personal relationships, learning, memory, self-image, and numerous others -- and show that bad packs a much stronger impact than good. They review a couple hundred diverse studies to make this point, and as they say at the end, the consistency of their findings about the disproportionate impact of bad things (compared to the power of good things)-- like negative emotions, hostility, abuse, dysfunctional acts, destructive relationships, serious injuries and accidents, incompetence, and on and on -- is depressingly consistent across study after after study. 

One implication for managers and numerous other influencers in organizations is that, while bringing and breeding great people, and encouraging civility, competence, effort, and other kinds of goodness is an important part of the job, such efforts will be undermined if you aren't constantly vigilant about eliminating the negative, which includes dealing with people who are bad apples.  Baumeister and his colleagues also do suggest that another implication is sheer volume -- overwhelming strong bad stuff with lots of weak good stuff.  I will discuss that approach at the end of this post.

By coincidence, my doctoral course on leadership is reading and discussing this article today, so I re-read it closely this weekend, and it just knocks my socks off.  Here are just a few quotes from the article that got my attention:

This one explains why bad could be so much stronger -- we are selected to focus on it:

From our perspective, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased probability of passing along their genes. (p. 325)

On bad versus events:

A diary study by David, Green, Martin, and Suls (1997) examined the effects of everyday good and bad events, as well as personality traits. Undesirable (bad) events had more pervasive effects on subsequent mood than desirable (good) ones. Although each type of event influenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad events influenced bad mood, and good events predicted good mood) to similar degrees, bad events had an additional effect on the opposite-valence mood that was lacking for good events. In other words, bad events influenced both good and bad moods, whereas good events influenced only good moods. (p. 327)

How long the impact of everyday events lasts was studied by Sheldon, Ryan, and Reis (1996). Bad events had longer lasting effects. In their data, having a good day did not have any noticeable effect on a person's well-being the following day, whereas having a bad day did carry over and influence the next day. (p.327)

On close relationships.  Note the implication is that if you do something bad in a close relationship, you've got to do at least five good things (on average) to make up for it:

On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994) has proposed a revealing diagnostic index for evaluating relationships: He proposed that in order for a relationship to succeed, positive and good interactions must outnumber the negative and bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratio falls below that, the relationship is likely to fail and breakup. This index converges well with the thrust of our argument: Bad events are so much stronger than good ones that the good must outnumber the bad in order to prevail. Gottman's index suggests that bad events are on average five times as powerful as good ones, at least with regard to close relationships. (p. 329)

The article goes on and on in this vein, digging into seemingly every possible nuance, and constantly concluding that "bad is stronger than good.:  Here are a some excerpts from the wrap-up toward the end:

Let us briefly summarize the evidence. In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events. Close relationships are more deeply and conclusively affected by destructive actions than by constructive ones, by negative communications than positive ones, and by conflict than harmony. Additionally, these effects extend to marital satisfaction and even to the relationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce). Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger and have bigger effects than friendly,harmonious ones. Bad moods and negative emotions have stronger effects than good ones on cognitive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good moods). That suggests that people's desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their desire to get into a good one. (p. 362)

Bad parenting can be stronger than genetic influences; good parenting is not. Research on social support has repeatedly found that negative, conflictual behaviors in one's social network have stronger effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad things receive more attention and more thorough cognitive processing than good things. When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact on the total impression than any comparable good information. (p.362)

Bad stereotypes and reputations are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger effects than good feedback. Bad health has a greater impact on happiness than good health, and health itself is more affected by pessimism (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) than optimism (the presence or absence of a positive outlook). (p.362)

Their closing paragraph, implies -- albeit weakly-- to one solution to overcoming the power of bad.

Although it may seem pessimistic to conclude that bad is stronger than good, we do not think that such pessimism is warranted. As we have suggested, there are several reasons to think that it may be highly adaptive for human beings to respond more strongly to bad than good. In the final analysis, then, the greater power of bad may itself be a good thing. Moreover, good can still triumph in the end by force of numbers. Even though a bad event may have a stronger impact than a comparable good event, many lives can be happy by virtue of having far more good than bad events.

I think this implied solution of working extra hard to crank up the good to drown out the bad is certainly part of the answer.  But, to me, another and probably more effective solution for managers is to work doggedly to screen out and stop bad people and bad behavior at every stage.  This means dealing with it via big things like recruiting, selection, training, rewards and punishments, and removing people; and, just as important, paying attention to the little things like  giving people feedback when they are destructive.   Another implication I emphasize is that self-awareness is important so that we realize when we are being bad and damaging others -- and damn well better work on changing our attitudes and actions.

I know this is a long and detailed post.  My view is that you can read the lighter and more bouncy piece in the Wall Street Journal, so I thought I would use this post to geek out a bit and dig into the underlying research.