Bob Sutton

Bob Nardelli at Home Despot: Style vs. Six Sigma

Bruce Nussbaum has a wonderful post on the recently fired Bob Nardelli at Home Depot (or "Home Despot" as some employees started calling it), on why command and control is so bad.  Bruce argues that "Autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on process--cost and quality. Six Sigma measures all that stuff wonderfully. Nardelli couldn't see beyond this. He hired dozens of command-and-control military guys to manage. He shifted Home Depot away from retail to a new contracting business that could more easily be controlled and measured." 

I think Bruce is on to something, that if you want creativity and learning, command and control is bad. BUT I think his argument is right, but incomplete.  The fact is that close managerial oversight and constant criticism and feedback aren't the only ways to drive down cost and increase quality.  In fact, these systems work best when employees have lots of data about cost and quality AND they police themselves rather than are policed by some boss.  That is part of the secret sauce of the Toyota Production system and of places like Southwest Airlines, Men's Wearhouse, and DaVita -- which runs hundreds of kidney dialysis centers at low cost while delivering the best quality in the business. It is also what I saw when I visited SuccessFactors a few weeks ago -- not close supervision but people who worked to please and impress their co-workers and because they took pride in doing a good job -- in fact these norms were so strong that rank and file employees felt safe about pressuring senior management to do their jobs better and senior management felt obligated to respond! 

My message is that a numbers-based and quality focused organization need not be top down, where bosses use numbers to lord over and push around their underlings. In fact, to the extent that there is a peer culture that presses people to do the right thing and that has the right information, you don't need to waste money on managers who watch people do the work -- rather than doing it themselves.(I would love to see the numbers about the cost of management and supervision under Nardelli's leadership -- his salary alone drove these numbers way-up and paying all those people to do command and control must cost a lot of money).

So I agree with Bruce for the most part, but want to emphasize that command and control does not equal lower cost and higher quality. Systems that run on peer control and great measures will be more efficient than those that depend on close managerial oversight-- and in fact have higher quality, because it is one thing to fool a boss who comes by once in awhile, but fooling your peers every minute of the day is a lot harder.

Finally, I don't think that Nardelli's reputation for arrogance helped him keep his job and -- although I have no inside information to confirm this-- I hope that another reason he was shown the door so abruptly was that the board decided to enforce the no asshole rule. Perhaps that is just my little dream, but I do think that when leaders are known as assholes AND their organization has performance problems, people lose their jobs a lot more quickly than when they are warm and well-liked leaders.

Publisher's Weekly Interview

Publisher's Weekly is the leading magazine written for the "Book Publishing and Selling."  They wrote a nice review of The No Asshole Rule. This week, they published a short interview with me about the book called Assholes Beware!

Pam Slim on Bob Knight

Pam Slim over at Escape from Cubicle Nation has a very thoughtful post on Bob Knight: The Perfect Mascot for "The No Asshole." As you probably already know, Knight becoming the "winningest college basketball coach of all time" this week. Pam uses ideas from The No Asshole Rule -- and a lot of her own ideas too -- to take on Knight's accomplishments.  Her conclusion is:

I think Bob Knight should have been stopped in his tracks a long time ago by his management and held accountable for his behavior.  His incredible talent and skill is overshadowed by juvenile behavior that is embarrassing to him and his family.  What a waste of a tremendous gift.  And what a disservice to the many young men he mentored as a coach.

Pam has a lot more interesting stuff to say than that, and as always, writes with fire and creativity. And I agree with her assessment completely.

P.S. If you want to get the in-depth story about Knight's demeaning and egotistical antics, read John Feinstein's compelling book A Season on the Brink.  Amazon suggests that it might be the best sports book ever written.

No Asshole Rule: The Video

Adam Sodwick and his crew from 50Lessons visited Stanford last year, and they did a series of short interviews with me about five different management "lessons."  They were professional and quite fun to work with.  One of lessons was about The No Asshole Rule. Check it out if you want to see my short description of why I wrote the book.  Just click on the "play now" button. I have had this link listed on my blog from the start, but realized I never did a post on it when I got several inquiries from people who asked if I had any video on the book.

50Lessons does unusually high quality videos and in fact has recently started working with Harvard Business School Press to distribute some of their material.

Boris Groysberg on The No Asshole Rule at Lehman Brothers and Schroder Wertheim

I have written about research on superstars by Harvard  Business School's Boris Groysberg before, both here and in Hard Facts. He has complied compelling evidence from both investment analysts and GE senior executives suggesting that star employees are less “portable” than many executive search firms might lead you to believe. BUT as I’ve blogged about, if you are going to hire a star from another firm, their odds of success go up substantially if you take both the star and his or her team. Boris tells me that he is currently finishing a book on the topic, which I look forward to reading.

But this post is about The No Asshole Rule. Boris wrote me a pair of detailed notes about a series of case studies that he has done that track Lehman Brothers’ research department over a 20 year period.  Boris reports that “the rule” helped fuel the rise of the research department there, and then when it was abandoned, was linked to performance problems, and when it was reinstated, performance again improved.

You can buy these case studies at www.hbsp.com.  Here is a link to all of Boris’ Harvard Business School Press writings (his HBR articles are very thoughtful too).  I will order and read the cases. But here is his summary of the power of the no asshole rule from the four cases that Boris and his collagues wrote:

Ashish Nanda and I wrote a series of cases on the Lehman Brother research department, and its initial rise under Jack Rivkin who implemented the "no asshole" rule (although we had to rephrase it in the case to the "no jerks" rule to adhere to the HBS standards even though everyone still described it as the "no asshole" rule). The no asshole rule at Lehman really helped to create a culture of teamwork, collaboration and many believed it drove the strong performance of the department.  Under Rivkin's rule, Lehman's research department became number 1 on Wall Street during 1990-1992, but the department fell in ranking shortly after Rivkin got fired. Later, the department got reinvented, which led to its subsequent rise again (with the "no asshole" rule reinstated).  In fact, we tracked this research department over a 20 year period, documenting HR polices and culture through its different transitions.

In the “Lehman Brothers: Rise of the equity research Department” case (the A case), Rivkin was emphatic about who he would not hire. “I have a ‘no jerk’ policy,” he declared. “No matter how good an analyst may be, given the structure we are trying to create here I am not going to bring a jerk into the department. To me, a jerk is someone difficult to manage, marching to his own drummer, not interested in what was going on within the department and within the firm. We are just not going to have people like that here.”  Recalled Balog, former star analyst and associate research head, “Jack was very clear in telling us that life’s too short to have prima donnas in the department even if they were number one ranked people. We wanted people that were well rounded and could have fun with others.”

 As one after another analysts attested, they loved working there under Jack Rivkin and Fred Fraenkel, and many passed up attractive offers to stay at a firm where their performance was supported in every conceivable way, and to be part of something they valued. “The research directors of other Wall Street firms were flabbergasted,” Fraenkel recalled. “Our people . . . were better analysts than they would be somewhere else because of the people in their team helping them and giving them insights into their industry. Our competitors were offering them jobs with hundreds of thousands of dollars more salary, yet they didn’t find it worthwhile to dislodge from what they had here.”

 

Under Rifkin and Fraenkel, Lehman’s research department achieved high performance with a budget considerably smaller than that of Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. (In 1992, Lehman’s research department budget was about $70 million, compared with Goldman’s $105 million and Merrill’s $125 million.) This is a phenomenon known in the department as “the Jack Rivkin discount.” Also, the Lehman A case tracks the turnover statistics which are significantly lower than the industry. The quotes and numbers are from the Lehman Brothers A-D cases.

Boris wrote me a second email that further documents the power of the no asshole rule in another firm:

In our study of research departments, a number of firms had “no-asshole” rule as an important organizational practice. So you are capturing something that more and more managers are explicitly thinking about and advocating. Let me offer you another example. In our study of research departments between 1988 and 1996, Ashish Nanda and I found that star analysts had 11.8 percent turnover rate, however, there were big differences by firms. More remarkably, Schroeder Wertheim lost only two ranked analysts over the course of nine years, for a total star turnover rate of about 2 percent (the lowest turnover rate).

Attached is an excerpt from my interview with Barry Tarasoff, research director at Schroder Wertheim, who elaborated on the strategy that he took, which resulted in the lowest star turnover rate in the industry from 1988 to 1996. “There isn’t any one magic potion. But the number-one thing—I called it Tarasoff’s First Principle—was ‘no assholes.’ When we recruited, we made an enormous attempt to bring in reasonable people. So we had a group of people that liked each other a great deal. Number two, we had a distinctive culture that you could never export to another firm.” The “no-asshole rule” was able to contain turnover.

Thank you Boris! This is great stuff.  I continue to be surprised how many firms have explicit “No Asshole” rules. In fact, I visited SuccessFactors last week and will be writing more about their “no assholes” rule and how it is woven together with 12 other “rules of engagement” such as transparency and teamwork. CEO Lars Dalgaard has built an impressive culture – energetic, performance-driven, and refreshingly free of bullshit. I especially love has last rule for all employees (including himself) ‘I will be a good person to work with – Not territorial, not be a jerk, and as Lars says often “it’s OK to have an asshole – just don’t be one”’ Now that is my kind of workplace!

Why Indifference is as Important as Passion

I've enjoyed the thoughtful reactions, additions, and suggested edits to my post a few days ago on 10 Things I Believe.   I posted my 10 things without explaining why I believed them, which led to people come up with creative explanations that never occurred to me.  In particular, Ann Michael over at manage to change had some great ideas about why "Indifference is as important as passion." Ann suggested:

Passion can make you too close to something.  

We all need to be able to step back and disconnect. In order to see flaws in the plan, respect the input of others, and maintain an open mind, a little indifference can go a long way. 

One other thing, too many disrespectful actions are explained away by passion. It’s as if passion can be the get-out-of-being-called-a-jerk-free card.  

Passion is NOT a license to steam roll everyone in your path!

I think Ann's ideas are great, as I said, ideas that never occurred to me. For the record, here are my original two reasons, but some of you likely have others as well.

The first reason stems from human cognitive limits.  As we all know, and as modern psychology has shown in gory detail, human beings can do a limited number of things at once, and even the best "multi-taskers" in the world are doomed to fail if they try to do too many things at once. So if you try to put all your emotional and physical effort into everything you do, you will end do everything badly.  Indifference is a key survival skill as there are some things you may need to do, but are so unimportant (or so badly done, like Stanford's sexual harassment training) that not caring as you travel through them is the best answer. And indifference can also help you sidestep things that seem important, but really aren't, allowing you to focus on the few things that really matter.

I talk a lot about the second reason in The No Asshole Rule. A hallmark of strong organizational cultures and effective work teams -- and effective leaders and other organization members -- is that they devote great passion and great emotional energy to what they do.  A people in such places really CARE about the people around them. Passion is a wonderful if your organization and your colleagues care about you.  BUT it is recipe for self-destruction if you are trapped in a job with a demeaning boss, or worse yet, knee-deep in an workplace where asshole poisoning runs rampant.  If you face constant abuse, then (until you can get out) going through the motions and "not letting it touch your soul" is one tactic that can help you survive with your self-esteem intact. In my view, when organizations and bosses treat their people badly, they get what they deserve when their people respond by becoming emotionally detached and doing as little as possible without getting fired.  In this imperfect world,  there are times when learning "not to give a shit" is the best short-term solution available.

Also, to return to Ann's point, I agree that people who are too passionate about what they are doing run the  risk of becoming assholes who steam-roll others (I love her point that passion can give them a "get-out-of-being-a-jerk-free card"). Ann's point reminded me of David Maister's insightful list of "I've been an asshole when,"  seven points that he started with "I got overexcited and over enthused on a topic (I lose my sense of proportion , just keep trying to make my point and don’t let people finish their sentences)."  I plead guilty: when I think of the times when I've been a temporary asshole, it has often been when I am "overexcited and over enthused" as David put it. One solution is to find a way -- or have someone else help you -- to turn down your passion and turn up your indifference. (The rest of his list is fantastic, they all struck home with me.)

In closing, let me emphasize that, on average, it is likely wiser to err on the side of caring too much rather than caring to little.  Passion leads people to do great things and to travel through life caring about their work and each other -- it often makes the world a better place. But indifference is worth talking about because it is something that management and workplace writers rarely consider.

Der Arschloch-Faktor: Thank You Germany!

The publishing business is sufficiently strange that, although The No Asshole Rule doesn't come out until February in the US  and  the UK,  my publisher Hanser has been selling the German language version since October.  I was in Germany in early October for a book tour and I had the remarkable experience of going to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is largest and most famous book fair in the world -- and is stunning in sheer physical size and number of books. All the big and famous publishing houses were at Frankfurt.  But I was most struck by the thousands of publishers in the world that scrape along selling remarkably few books each year, yet they make th trek to Frankfurt each year. 

 

Der Arschloch-Faktor ("The Asshole Factor") is doing well.  We got press coverage in everything from the respectable German-language version of the Financial Times to the tabloid Bild (which Wikipedia claims is the best selling newspaper in Europe),  where they ran three articles on the book including a "self-test" to help determine if you are, and asshole (or I guess an "Arschloch"). My editor, the enthusiastic and relentless Martin Janik, reports that the book has gone into the third printing already and is currently #4  on Focus magazine's business books best-seller list. Der Arschloch-Faktor has been in the top 50 books on Amazon in Germany, and currently was ranked  29th among all books last time checked.  As I say in my headline, thank you Germany!

I am getting quite a few emails from German readers about workplace assholes,  I got an especially interesting one from a fellow who asked about the problem of dealing with his demeaning and cruel professor.   He is in an especially difficult predicament victims because of the power differences between faculty and students.  Der Arschloch-Faktor does offer ideas about how to deal with assholes you can't get away from, including looking for small victories and learning how to practice indifference.  But I didn't have any instant or easy answers for that oppressed student  -- life isn't always so simple.  But it did remind me about the power differences between Stanford students and faculty members like me, which is something that is all too easy to forget, and something to remember at all times because we can -- often unwittingly -- make their lives miserable. 

I am curious to hear from more German readers about "asshole management" problems and solutions in their workplaces , especially about the tactics that people use to battle back against oppressive superiors and peers.

P.S. Der Arschloch-Faktor sold very well over the holiday break and is now the the top selling business book on German Amazon.  Thank you again Germany! 

Smiling Makes You Happy

Gretchen over at The Happiness Project had a lovely and thoughtful post yesterday called smile, smile, smile.  She ended the post by saying: 'And apart from its effect on my dealings with other people, smiling makes me feel happier. Actions trigger feelings, so by going through the motions of feeling happier, I change my mood. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”'

There are some very important ideas in this post, and in fact, they are backed by some rigorous research. The first is that, as Gretchen implies, if others see you smiling and experience you as warm, they are more likely to believe you are a nice person and more likely to comply with your requests.  That is an old finding, and there are interesting studies of tipping that show, as you would expect, a friendly waiter or waitress hauls in bigger tips. So if you want to signal to others that you aren't an asshole, a little smiling and warmth will go a long way.  My colleague Anat Rafaeli and I did a bit of research and writing on the expression of emotion in organizational life in the 1980s and 1990s, and this theme can be found throughout the behavioral sciences.  We wrote a couple papers reviewing the literature that are especially relevant:

Rafaeli & Sutton (1989) The expression of emotion in organizational life. In L.L. Cummings & B.M. Staw (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 11: 1-42.

Rafaeli & Sutton (1987) Expression of emotion as part of the work role. Academy of Management Review.  12:23-27 

Gretchen's other point is the especially interesting one: her claim that smiling makes her feel happy. This may sound like one of those wacky theories, but it turns out that a series of rigoruous studies by Robert Zajonc and his colleagues show that, in fact, smiling brings about physiological changes that make you feel happy, and frowning bring about changes that can make you feel sad and grumpy.  The upshot of all this, from an asshole management standpoint, is that if you feel like an asshole, smile or (as I explain below) start saying the letter "e" over and over again.  And if other people are getting nasty, try to get them to smile or say the letter "e," and to stop frowning and saying the letter U.

I know it sounds crazy, but Zajonc is one of the most creative and influential psychologists in history.  Here is the research as I summarized it in Weird Ideas That Work.

‘“There is now compelling evidence that smiling causes people to feel happy. Requiring people to smile, no matter how they really feel at first, results in increased positive feelings; frowning conversely decreases positive feelings. Robert Zajonc and his colleagues show that smiling leads to physiological changes in the brain that cool the blood, which in turn makes people feel happy. [A series of experiments] show that positive emotion and cooler facial temperatures result when people saying the letter “e” or the sound “ah” over and over again, apparently because making these sounds requires a smile-like expression. These [experiments] also show that negative emotion (and hotter facial temperatures) result from repeating sounds like the letter O or the German vowel ü, apparently because making these sounds require a frown-like expression to pronounce. This effect was found to be equally strong in both German and American research subjects. These researchers also found direct effects of temperature on emotion, demonstrating that people who have had cold air blown up their noses are happier than those who have had hot air blown up their noses. Hundreds of other studies show that hot temperatures are a powerful and reliable cause of foul moods and interpersonal conflict (especially aggression and violence).

So, if you want to be really weird, try increasing happiness (and thus creativity) by having your people say “ah, ah, ah,” “e, e ,e, e,” or perhaps saying “cheese” over and over again, blowing cold air up their noses, or just keeping the buildings cold where creative people work. Or as Jane Dutton at The University of Michigan told me after she heard Robert Zajonc talk about these ideas: “When I want to get in a good mood, I’ll just go home and stick my head in the refrigerator.”’

Here are key references for those of you who want to dig into this issue. Note that this research is published the very best peer reviewed journals in psychology – and of course Science is an equally serious publication that reaches a wider audience.

Anderson, C.A. “Temperature and Aggression: Ubiquitous Effects of Heat on the Occurrence of Human Violence”, Psychological Bulletin 106 (1989): 74-96.

Baron, R., Human Aggression (New York: Plenum, 1977)

Griffitt, W., “Environmental Effects On Interpersonal Affective Behavior: Ambient-Effective Temperature And Attraction”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 15 (1970): 240-244.

Zajonc, R.B. “Emotion and Facial Efference: An Ignored Theory Reclaimed”, Science 228 (April 5, 1985): 15-21

Zajonc, R. B., S. T. Murphy, & M. Inglehart, “Feeling and Facial Efference: Implications of the Vascular Theory of Emotion” Psychological Review 96 (1989): 395-416.”

This research has some pretty weird implications for effective “asshole management.”   A German study that followed from this research showed that people reported being in better moods when they put a pencil between their teeth (creating a smile-like expression) and they reported being worse moods when they put a pencil between their lips (creating a frown like gesture). The effects uncovered in these studies on mood are not huge, but they are consistent and statistically significant. 

So, I am not sure I am joking or not, but next time you enter a den of assholes, you might use this research to “cool them out:” turn down the heat or crank up the air conditioning, give them cold drinks, show them funny movies, ask them to keep smiling, get them to say “e e e e e” over and over again, and pass out some pencils and ask them to bite down on them during the meeting. [I invite other equally weird ideas… in fact Zajonc tells me that putting those band-aid things on your nose as some athletes do might also facilitate positive emotion because it helps cool air get to the brain more efficiently, so you might have people put those things on).

Of course, if you act this weird, it may turn a group of uptight assholes against you -- but they are evidence-based practices!

Diego and Uncle Valentin on "The No Asshole Rule" in Spanish

I wrote a post last week asking readers for ideas about what to call The No Asshole Rule in Spanish.  I offered free books (in Spanish and English) to the first 5 people who made suggestions, and I was delighted with the range and thought that people devoted to the question (including some suggestions for the French version, which will be coming out).  The last suggestion I received was especially amazing. It came from Diego at Metacool, but resulted from a long conversation among Diego, Diego's father, and Diego's uncle Valentin Sama.   Valentin Sama is a professor in Madrid and he runs a very cool web photography magazine called DSLR -- check it out.  The comment is so good that and complex that it is well worth repeating as a post for those of you who did not dig into the comments:

Bob,

I think you should be able to find a Spanish version of the title, but I think you have a challenge in terms of getting the idiomatic fit. I asked a Spanish friend of mine (my uncle), and he said the following:

"Desde luego, absolutamente, para España, no sirve lo de "pendejo".

Si no se quiere utilizar gilipollas, podría usarse la palabra
tradicional de "idiota" o "imbécil".

Curiosamentes, estás palabras, que al igual que gilipollas son ahora
insultos, vienen de una degradación del uso de la palabra médica
"idiocia", de donde se deriva "idiota".

Ahora me entra la duda añadida de si "Rule" se emplea no como "regla" o
"norma", sino como "ruling" o sea, del hecho de "gobernar", "dominar"?

El autor del libro debe asumir, pienso, distintos títulos para américa
latina y para España. En España no sirve "pendejo" que es más bien el
aficionado a irse de juerga, pero sirve "idiota", "estúpido", "imbécil",
y desde luego, si se es más valiente, "gilipollas".
Desde luego, "polla" viene de "cock", y en ocasiones, cuando no se
quiere decir "gilipollas" se tiene a decir "gilipuertas", pero eso ya es
muy, muy idiomático.

He leido algunos de los ejemplos, y lo que definen ahí como asshole, más
que un gilipollas es un "hijo de puta", "son of a bitch", pero eso ya es
muy fuerte."

So, something like "pendejo" won't work in Spain, but might work for Latin America. He suggested "gilipollas" as the term in lieu of asshole, but it's stronger, maybe too strong. If you can localize (and there's a strong argument for that move), you could put pendejo for the Americas and gilipollas for Europe.

Are you open to changing the cover art? A great suggestion from a wise person I know (of Cuban and Venezuelan extraction) would be to put "gilipollas" or whatever the word is on the cover with the international "no" symbol (as in Ghostbusters) over it.

Publishers Weekly Review

                                                                                                                        

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't Sutton, Robert I. (Author) ISBN: 0446526568 Warner Business Published 2007-02 Hardcover, $22.99 (224p) Business & Economics | Business Etiquette; Business & Economics | Business Life - General Reviewed 2006-12-18 PW

This meticulously researched book, which grew from a much buzzed-about article in the Harvard Business Review, puts into plain language an undeniable fact: the modern workplace is beset with assholes. Sutton (Weird Ideas that Work), a professor of management science at Stanford University, argues that assholes-those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their aggression on the less powerful-poison the work environment, decrease productivity, induce qualified employees to quit and therefore are detrimental to businesses, regardless of their individual effectiveness. He also makes the solution plain: they have to go. Direct and punchy, Sutton uses accessible language and a bevy of examples to make his case, providing tests to determine if you are an asshole (and if so, advice for how to self-correct), a how-to guide to surviving environments where assholes freely roam and a carefully calibrated measure, the "Total Cost of Assholes," by which corporations can assess the damage. Although occasionally campy and glib, Sutton's work is sure to generate discussions at watercoolers around the country and deserves influence in corporate hiring and firing strategies. (Feb.)                                        

Copyright © 1997-2005  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Enfant Terrible: Does it Mean a Creative Asshole Who is Worth the Trouble?

I got an email for a friend who sent me the AP story below and asked 'Is "enfant terrible" what we call assholes in creative positions?'  See the last paragraph of the story.

NEW YORK (AP) --O.J. Simpson's would-be publisher, Judith Regan, was fired Friday, her sensational, scandalous tenure at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. ending with the tersest of announcements.

"Judith Regan's employment with HarperCollins has been terminated effective immediately," HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman said in a statement. "The Regan publishing program and staff will continue as part of the HarperCollins General Books Group."

Regan's firing comes less than a month after Murdoch's cancellation of Simpson's hypothetical murder confession, "If I Did It," a planned book and Fox television interview that was greeted with instant and near-universal disgust when announced.

An industry force since the 1980s, when she produced best-sellers by Drew Barrymore and Kathie Lee Gifford for Simon & Schuster, Regan has been labeled a "foul-mouthed tyrant" and the "enfant terrible of American publishing." She is also widely envied -- if not admired -- for her gift of attracting attention to her books and to herself.

I think my friend is right, "enfant terrible" is loaded with the implication that such nastiness is not only more acceptable in creative work, it also seems to imply that having a hot temper can be more effective as well -- or at least that such nastiness is something you often have tolerate if you want to work with creative people. I am not sure that being a demeaning tyrant enhances creativity, but I am pretty sure that it is part of our stereotype of a creative person -- so it probably helped Judith Regan's reputation in some ways, as I believe it has helped Steve Job's reputation over the years to be seen as a demanding perfectionist who is obsessed with design and user experience. In addition, there is some research -- especially some fantastic studies from Iceland -- that suggest there is a higher incident of mental illness among the most creative people, especially in music, literature, and the arts. So there is some evidence (although not in the sciences) of some truth in the stereotype.

As for me, I don't care how creative they are, I won't want work with -- or for -- any crazy assholes.

P.S. Someone asked about the research from Iceland.  Check out Dean Keith Simonton's astounding book Origins of Genius.  You can search inside of Amazon to get to the research, which is summarized on pages 104 and 105.

P.P.S. Also check out The New York Times story, apparently Ms. Regan had quite a tirade.

Help Us And Get Two Books! How Do You Say "The No Asshole Rule" In Spanish?

One of the most entertaining parts of working on The No Asshole Rule is the challenge of translating the title into other languages.  The trick is to find the phrase or term that may not be a literal translation, but that is the best "cultural" translation.   For example, most Germans I know seem to think that Der Arschloch-Faktor  is the right translation, although I did get one comment that the implications were a bit too strong, that asshole is a nastier word in German than in English.

I also had an incredibly fun dinner at the Frankfurt book fair in October with a group of book buyers from Asia. The folks from Amazon Japan had great fun talking about the right term to use in Japanese, and although they considered other words, they agreed that something with the word baka was perfect.  A translator wrote me that it means "horse-deer", and is "the ultimate and all-purpose insult for stupidity." She also suggested hirame (flatfish/turbot/flounder who's eyes rotate to the top side so it can only see above itself, not below), "slang for someone who sees only up the hierarchy."  I know there is interest in Japan, and the English version will be sold widely there, but I don't know if the title will include "baka."  In addition, the French translation rights were just sold, and my charming editor there Geoff Staines tells me that the translation is done, the book will appear in March,  and he will be sending me a cover picture soon (and then I will get to find out what they call it too). The trick here, as you can see, is to come up with a word that translates culturally, not literally, like baka.  This brings us to the Spanish translation.  I got word from my literary agents that:

“Your Spanish publisher is struggling a bit with how to translate the title and has asked how it's been translated in other languages. I'm going to send them the other title translations, and ask our Spanish agent for her thoughts, but if you or Don [she means Don Lamm, my main agent along with Christy Fletcher] have particular thoughts about the Spanish use of "asshole" please do let me know.”  

Don Lamm checked around (he is an amazing guy with about 50 years in the business; Don has only been an agent for a few years and was CEO of W.W. Norton before that), and wrote back “The best street linguist I know in  Santa Fe  came up with this:  Qulone.  It may, however, not carry over from Mexican to Iberian Spanish.”

So that is where we are at right now: Clearly, we need some help. Calling all Spanish speakers! What is the right cultural translation for “The No Asshole Rule?”

I’ll offer an incentive: a free copy of both the English and Spanish versions of the book to the first five people who make suggestions (post the suggestion as a comment on my blog, to get conversation started, but email me your address so I can pre-order your books).

We look forward to your ideas.

A Workplace Asshole in Denmark

A professor from Denmark sent me this troubling story about a worker who -- after relentless abuse for years -- was no longer able to work. In this case, TCA (total cost of assholes) was mighty high, in both financial and human terms. I quote his summary and translation

Asshole compensation

A 39 old man from Denmark was recently declared unfit for work by the national workers compensation board. When he started work as a supermarket employee he was functioning normally, he was reliable and was well regarded by colleagues. Eight years later he left his job with a mental breakdown so severe that he has no prospects of ever returning to the labour market.

Basing it’s decision on a regulatory change that included Post Traumatic Stress as an occupational disease, the Workers Compensation Board writes “Your unspecified stress reaction is caused by your employment as a sales clerk, during which you have been exposed to highly stressful psychological harassment over a prolonged period, including accusations of theft put forward by your immediate supervisor” (my translation from a local news report).

Behind the official language lies a story of a new supervisor who would verbally abuse, complain, assault and accuse the sales clerk of theft. The supervisor had other targets too but the treatment of the sales clerk accelerated when he became union representative. His vacation time was moved repeatedly, he was told that his co-workers had complained about him, the supervisor would greet anyone but the victim. When the supervisor became angry he would throw chairs around and tell the victim to find another job. If the victim complained to upper store management, he was told not to weep in the boss’s office. He was accused of theft and sent home, but no evidence was offered and the claim was not prosecuted. Finally he was called to a meeting where he was told that he had used his position as union representative to threaten colleagues while at the same time siding with staff too much.

As a result of the serious mental disability, the victim of job-related abuse has now been awarded a permanent disability pension. When his mental condition is determined to have stabilized he may receive further compensation from the workers compensation board (a mandatory insurance system), the amount depending on how severe his loss of employability is assessed to be.

Maureen Rogers on Charismatic Assholes

Maureen Rogers over at Pink Slip has a detailed, scary, and inspired post on charismatic assholes. She identified four different kinds of assholes in an earlier post:

• Occasional Offenders 
• Credit Grabbers (inverse: Blame Gamers) 
• Weaklings 
• Charismatic Assholes (CA's)

Maureen makes a compelling case that "CA's" are the worst.  I agree that people who have the power to attract and persuade others, but are selfish and mean-spirited beneath the veneer, are extremely dangerous. In fact, although charismatic leaders are generally described in positive terms by management theorists, other behavioral scientists often portray them in darker terms -- especially when they write about political and religious leaders. The best book I've ever read on the dark side is by  anthropologist Charles Lindholm, which is simply called Charisma. Unfortunately, it is out of print, but it looks like you can pick up a used copy on Amazon. Lindholm shows how leaders including Hitler, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones used their charisma to do vile things to their followers and enemies.

Check out Maureen's inspired post. There are no murderers, but some damn scary people!

Clueless Assholes in Corporate America

During the last week or so, I've had discussions with several colleagues who have argued that assholes come in two basic flavors:

1. "Intentional" assholes who want to leave others feeling demeaned and de-energized.

2. "Clueless" assholes who damage people without realizing how much harm they are doing.

I am not sure which one is worse, but clueless assholes can be pretty bad, as these two stories sent to me by a marketing consultant show (I am not naming him, for obvious reasons):

Here are two stories from the same company.

1. After we acquired a new company, the head of HR went out to one of the regional offices to do the inevitable layoffs. He did them in a glass walled conference room in the middle of the office, so that for hours every time someone went to the bathroom or got a cup of coffee, they walked by a big glass box containing someone getting canned, often crying, etc.

2. A VP at the same company fired someone by calling him on his cell phone while the guy was sitting at a neonatal ICU with his wife and newborn premature child. After firing him on the phone in the midst of that, he was overhead by a number of people saying, "That one was fun!" A bit later he confided to several of us that he was trying to bring people in the company together and boost morale, because "I'm a healer."

Also, the only upside of such blatant idiocy is that these examples imply such clear guidance about how to avoid being a flaming asshole.

Suzy Welch on “Send the Jerks Packing”

I wrote a post a couple weeks back about a column that Jack and Suzy Welch published in BusinessWeek called Send the Jerks Packing. Now you can read it online or listen to the related podcast.  Jack and Suzy described what I call an asshole, and they would call a “Type 4 managers,” as follows:

Then there's a fourth kind of employee, the one who delivers the numbers but doesn't live the values. You know the type--who doesn't? They exist at every level in almost every organization. These high performers can be mean, secretive, or arrogant. Very often they kiss up and kick down. Some are stone-cold loners, while others are moody, keeping those around them in a kind of terrorized thrall.

As I said my earlier post, I know Suzy from her years as editor of the Harvard Business Review, so I dropped her a note about her column and shared some of the reactions I have received to The No Asshole Rule. Indeed, they seemed to have tapped into the same pool of pain. The responses that Jack and Suzy got their “jerks” column were much like the deluge I got from my 2004 Harvard Business Review on the rule, called Not Worth the Trouble. Suzy wrote me, “Well, if the response to our column is any indication, your new book will get a ton of attention. We received hundreds of emails after it ran -- mostly from people who said they were working for "Type 4" managers. (We even got a letter from a person who identified himself as a Type 4 -- but claimed the company made him do it!).”

Suzy also added that several lawyers wrote them to warn that it was unwise to fire a jerk in public for acting like a “Type 4” manager; indeed, more broadly, the lawyers I know (and have read) warn that public firing for any kind of offense – including racial and sexual harassment – can backfire because the humiliation can open a company up to counter-claims. 

Suzy’s comment brings up the legal challenges of driving bullies out of the workplace. Check out this interesting article by lawyer Paul Buchanan that addresses the question “Is it Against the Law to be a Jerk?” His answer seems to be that it isn’t against the law to be what I would call an equal opportunity asshole, but being a jerk does increase risk for the demeaning employee (and his or her company) if there is any hint of racism, sexism, or sexual harassment. As Buchanan points out, U.S. law here is evolving and may change in the future, plus laws in some states may provide recourse for employees who can demonstrate that they are in a “hostile work environment.”  The UK appears to be different. Companies there that condone “bullies” have suffered some major loses in court lately. Check out this 2006 UK settlement where a bullied worker was awarded 800,000 pounds.  Also, the Wikipedia entry on Workplace Bullying has a useful overview of pertinent laws in several countries.

My view on all this is that if you have to check with a lawyer to make sure you or your company are dishing out the "right" kind of abuse to employees, you are probably an asshole, or are at least knee-deep in a swarm of assholes.  The best recourse for companies (and people who pick places to work in) isn’t to rely on laws against psychological abuse, but to state and enforce workplace policies against being a workplace jerk – to make it a standard for hiring, paying, promoting, and firing people. Examples include Southwest Airlines, IDEO, and the software firm SuccessFactors.

In fact, if you run or work in an organization that enforces some variation of the no asshole rule (this is usually done in more polite language), I’d love to hear from you. I am always looking for more examples -- and nuances -- of how  the rule is applied.

P.S. Polly LaBarre, co-author of Mavericks, put up a nice post called Bob Sutton’s Weird Ideas, where she shows links between The No Asshole Rule and my earlier book on Weird Ideas That Work.  The notion that there are any similarities between the two books – except that they are evidence-based and reflect my background as an organizational psychologist – never occurred to me until I read Polly’s post! 

The Damage Done

I confess that it is fun to write about things like the Asshole song  and The Pecking Order. And I guess I can justify this fun because it makes it easier to talk about a difficult subject (one of the classic benefits of humor). But whenever I start having too much fun with the subject, I am brought back Earth with reminders about how much damage that workplace assholes do to victims, co-workers, and families. As I show in The No Asshole Rule, multiple surveys from the  U.S. and the United Kingdom suggest that between 15% and 25% of employees report being the victims of persistent psychological abuse at work (and the percentages are much higher in some occupations, like nursing).  The negative effects of such abuse on mental and physical health of both victims and bystanders are well-documented, along with evidence that demeaning jerks drive people out of organizations and undermine the commitment of those who won’t or can’t leave. But statistics don’t quite capture the bad feelings and other nasty effects generated by workplace assholes.

I have been getting some mighty grim emails lately about the damage done by demeaning and abusive peers and bosses, which remind that the no asshole rule is something that organizations – and assholes themselves – need to take seriously, both to protect the esteem of their people and to develop a productive and creative workforce. These emails also remind me that the policies that firms like SuccessFactors or Southwest have against hiring (or tolerating) nasty people could stop a lot of destruction if they were adopted in more workplaces.

Consider one manager who was clearly working in a place dominated by the  “pro-asshole” rather than the “no asshole” rule.  He wrote me that, when he expressed disagreement with his boss about a merger (after being asked for his opinion during a meeting), his boss shot back, “I know what your saying and if anyone comes up to me and is a naysayer about this project I going to tell them that they are a idiot!”  Ouch! That will teach employees that the only right answers are “yes boss,” “you are right,” and “I agree completely.”

Even worse, a distraught woman who was promoted to supervisory position under an abusive boss wrote:

I was promoted to supervisor 9 months ago and only lasted in the position for 6 months because I couldn't work with the same boss I worked with before!! I hate to admit I knew she could be an asshole before I accepted the position. What was I thinking? I heard the yelling sessions behind closed doors with her superiors. I heard the nasty things she would say about anyone who 'got her in trouble'.

Once I was supervisor, there was no 'mentoring' or 'coaching' as I had expected from her. If I made one mistake in judgment or on a function I was performing, I was pulled into the office for an hour long discussion which usually ended with "do you want to step down?" This happened about every two weeks.  I started to lose sleep, stop eating, hiding mistakes for the fear of being pulled in the office and trying to find ways to deal with the negativity or avoid meeting with her. I sought counseling from a coworker, begged her and her boss to send me to training seminars; they said they'd send me to seminars---broken promises. … Finally, after she flat out told me she just didn’t have the time to train me, I went over her head to personnel. 

Unfortunately, although the personnel department tried to intervene, they had no luck reforming this abusive boss, and so this employee just gave-up. But even that doesn’t seem to be working. She added,  “I went back to my old job and kept part of my raise...but she just has not backed down. If I make one mistake however minor it is to everyone else who has made it as well---I'm pulled in the office and yelled at.” And she went on to say,  “Right now, …I can't sleep or eat very well. I have to take anti-anxiety pills in order to sleep.”

The statistics about prevalence and effects of workplace are important to remember, but stories like this one make the millions of painful experiences behind such numbers come alive.  Such stories also remind us of other key lessons about how to survive the wrath of uncivilized and demeaning people.  This employee, as she says, knew her new boss would be an asshole before she took the job – after all, she had overheard all that screaming. It also is a reminder that enforcing the no asshole rule is something that is best done as part of an organization everyday routines– and I mean not what is routinely said, but what is routinely done.  This woman complained to personnel, but they were unable or unwilling to actually enforce the rule. Perhaps they will do something eventually, but there seemed to be no effort to reel in this nasty boss, who apparently blamed her underlings for mistakes they made as a result of her own impatience and incompetence.

I advised this poor woman to get out of that workplace if she possibly could and, in the meantime, to carefully document every incident in the event that she needed to demonstrate the pattern of abuse to HR or an attorney.  If anyone else has any other advice, please chime

Asshole Song by Dennis Leary: YouTube Video

When I was writing The No Asshole Rule, one of the things I would do to entertain myself was to go to iTunes and listen to clips of various songs on the subject.  I just did a search of iTunes, it returned 150 items, so there are a lot of asshole songs. My favorite is Dennis Leary's "Asshole,"  which is a weird combination of wit, sarcasm, and spot-on examples.   I got an email this week that pointed me to the YouTube video of Leary's minor masterpiece-- check it out, it is pretty funny.

P.S. My second favorite song on the subject is Kinky Friedman's "Proud to be Asshole from El Paso," a parody of "Proud to be an Okie of Muskogee."

The Pecking Order

A thoughtful creativity professor sent me this image, and added 'e.e.cummings wrote a poem called“the song of olaf”...in which he provides wonderful advice for dealing with the assholes of the world: “...there is some shit i will not eat...”'   I think the poem and the picture go together well, although those birds at the bottom of heap need to find some way to fly away if they want to avoid spending their days eating the crap dropped from above -- not unlike the predicament that some abused underlings are caught in, as in the above post and associated comments on the damage done.

JerkFests

Adrian Savage over at Slow Leadership has a an insightful new post based on his reading of advanced copy of The No Asshole Rule.  I first encountered Adrian as the author of a lovely new book  (I will talk about it in more detail in the future) called Slow Leadership: Civilizing the Organization, which I endorsed with much enthusiasm after seeing a pre-publication version. As I wrote him after reading his book, we are both singing the same tune (albeit with different words, and in my case, somewhat more nasty words). Adrian's comments on the book were not only kind, they were detailed and insightful, I especially like his point about "Jerkfests."  I quote:

So there ought to be a name you could use to identify such foul organizations—those rank, jerk-infested swamps where even the rats hold their noses. How about “JerkFests”—places where assholes proliferate and only another long-time, gold-plated, doctoral-level jerk could enjoy him or herself and find a home? In a JerkFest, Hamburger Management is normal and assholes rule. Perhaps there should be a symbol people could apply to the door posts to warn anyone entering what will be found inside; or major magazines could list the “100 Greatest JerkFests of 2006" in the way that they list the 100 richest people or most successful organizations.