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On finally reading “The No Asshole Rule”

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Last week, on a trip to Las Vegas for the Wireless 09 trade show, I finally read Bob Sutton’s book “The No Asshole Rule.” I had occasion to mention this fact to some folks at a happy hour. One intern responded, “I took a class from him at Stanford, and he was amazed that his other book took a year to write and almost nobody read it, while ‘The No Asshole Rule’ was written in three months and that’s the book he’s remembered for.”

I’m not amazed by that fact. Besides the in-your-face title, the asshole culture at work is universally understood and experienced. It’s also rarely if ever confronted–meaning that a book that takes on the subject has a pent-up demand of readers. In other words, “The No Asshole Rule” is perfect in its timing, voice, subject matter, and market need. A hit.

The book is intended to help people recognize when they’re trapped in a toxic culture and escape or cope as necessary, and to help companies justify not hiring certain people with asshole qualities that could create such a toxic culture. But most useful for me was the challenge to confront my inner asshole.

I think most people harbor one of these in their psyche. Perhaps it only comes out when your kid wakes you up at 5:30am and asks if it’s OK for him to go downstairs and play Nintendo, or when you get a telemarketing call during dinner. For others (me included), it’s more easily accessed. And when I got into the corporate world, the culture of advancement helped bring it out more and more often, until I was a senior manager, when I was probably more than 50% asshole (my employees and colleagues might raise that number a bit).

Given that, I probably couldn’t have had a better break than, as happened a few years ago, to leave the corporate world behind and become a sole practitioner. It is very very difficult to make a living being an asshole when you are a lone contributor working for companies. You have to be humble, do good work, and make sure the client likes what you have done. That is the oxygen for this business. Treating clients poorly is a recipe for oblivion. I may not make as much money as I did a few years ago, but I think I’m a nicer person for it.

So perhaps I read the book at the perfect time. At any rate, “The No Asshole Rule” helped me understand the true cost of assholism, and how to recognize it and treat it in myself.

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"What Was Privacy?" Indeed!

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Compare these two quotes:

I have a date there with Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that’s piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM’s tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them….

Takriti, a slim 40-year-old with wide, languid eyes, opens the door of his small office. He wears a rugby shirt tucked tightly into blue jeans. I tell him that being modeled doesn’t sound like much fun. I picture an all-knowing boss anticipating my every move, perhaps sending me an e-mail with the simple message, “No!” before I even get up my nerve to ask for a raise. But Takriti focuses on the positive. Imagine that your boss finally recognizes your strengths, he says—maybe ones that are hidden even to you. Then he “puts you into situations where you will thrive.”

Still, Takriti confesses that he’s nervous…. With time, he and his team hope to build detailed models for each worker, each one complete with a person’s quirks, daily commute, and allies, perhaps even enemies. These models might one day include whether the workers eat beef or pork, how seriously they take the Sabbath, whether a bee sting or a peanut sauce could lay them low.
(from “The Numerati,” by Stephen Baker, excerpted in Business Week, 28 Aug 2008)

-and this-

Harriet Pearson is IBM’s chief privacy officer, a role she assumed in 2000, when Lou Gerstner was CEO. Gerstner was “convinced that as the Web emerged as a business platform, companies—particularly one such as IBM—had to lead on privacy,” Pearson says. “We were at an inflection point with respect to the pervasiveness of technology in business processes, and he correctly judged that IBM needed to use its leadership on that issue to support our initiatives on e-commerce.”… In 2005, under Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano’s leadership, IBM adopted a forward-looking global policy that forswore the use of employees’ genetic profiles in making decisions about hiring or access to health insurance and other benefits. Pearson credits IBM’s own “DNA” in issues of employee privacy and nondiscrimination for the logic behind its policy on genetic profiling. “There’s a direct line that I can draw back to our history in the 1950s and 1960s that is consistent with who we are as a company,” she says. (In May 2008 George Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. IBM’s early support facilitated its passage.) IBM’s manifold adventures in new technology—including systems for accelerating genomic research and pharmacological innovation—enable it to foresee developments that have implications for privacy. Pearson says it’s part of her job to scan company and industry horizons for potentially gnarly situations: “My business needs make me as likely, in one day, to be looking at genetics and RFID, and what they mean for privacy issues, as at data privacy and security issues associated with global business processes and the emergence of what’s being called ‘cloud computing.’” (from “What Was Privacy?” by Lew McCreary, Harvard Business Review, October 2008)

Both quotes concern IBM. And so, are you as confused as I am?

A company that characterizes itself as a privacy pioneer is mathematically modeling its consultants? This is what happens when cognitive bias embeds itself in a bureaucracy. IBM’s people consider themselves privacy pioneers, yet at the same time they install procedures that to an outside observer are clear invasions of their employees’ privacy.

Let me relate a little privacy story. A few years ago, I was involved in a dispute with my employer over an employment contract. While this dispute was ongoing, I still worked at the company. One day, I looked at my laptop, and thought of the servers and networks that carried my emails, web searches, etc., to the internet. The company could have been capturing all this information, scrutinizing it, and twisting it into evidence to support their case.

I felt a chill. What had I searched for? What emails had I sent? What personal information would they have access to? At that moment, I didn’t have trust in the company’s good will. Quite the opposite.

God forbid they would have had a “mathematical model” of me.

It’s clear that people ascribe good motives to their own actions, while in others those same actions would seem questionable or downright wrong (see “I’m OK, You’re Biased” by Dan Gilbert). The question is, who can blow the whistle at a large corporation? Who, at IBM, could say, “This is just wrong. We shouldn’t be doing it,” and be listened to?

UPDATE: Please read Harriet Pearson’s comment below. She points to this blog post as an elaboration of IBM’s views.

(Thanks to Cognitive Edge for the pointer to the Business Week excerpt.)

(Photo from bretwalda via stock.xchng)

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"What if your whole company acts like an a–hole?"

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

I was talking to my friend this morning about Bob Sutton’s “The No Asshole Rule” and its corollary, “if you can’t escape working for an asshole, you need to learn how to be indifferent, now not to care too much.”

My friend’s question: “What if your whole company acts like an asshole?”

He elaborated. “I went to a retirement party for a friend of mine who worked for the phone company. They’ve been downsizing forever. There are guys who have been there 25-30 years, and they’re trapped. They hate it there, but they have nowhere else to go. So they go through the motions. It’s filled with people like that.”

Me: “Economists keep telling us that economies of scale mean big companies have advantages.”

Him: “Scale economies must mean a lot if those companies still make money, while they’re full of people who don’t care anymore.”

Disclosure: I’ve worked for very large companies and very small companies in my career. As you can probably guess, I liked working at the smaller companies better.

Related posts:
The Value of Not Caring in the Workplace

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The Mistake Bank manifesto

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I’ve been reading the new book “Senior Leadership Teams: How to Make Them Great,” by Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman. Very close to the end of the book I found a passage that is a better explanation of what’s behind the Mistake Bank than anything I could write myself. While it’s focused on senior leaders, I think the ideas work for anyone who has a job or owns a business. [I'll do a full review of the book next week. Sneak preview: it's very good.]

To learn continuously… requires that senior leaders move beyond well-practiced leadership habits and well-learned personal models of what makes for a great leadership team. What’s needed is active experimentation with new and unfamiliar leadership strategies, and whenever there is experimentation expect that there will also be failure.. More often than not, trying out a new grip or swing in golf or tennis results in worsened performance for a while. But these experiments also generate learnings that cannot be had otherwise. The same is true for experimentation with leadership strategies and skills.

In fact, error and failure always provide more opportunities for learning than do success and achievement, because failures generate data that you can mine for insight into how you might improve your assumptions or your mental model of team leadership. Indeed, the bigger the failure, the greater the learning opportunity. To learn from failure requires that you ask questions that arouse anxiety (for example, about the validity of your deeply-held assumptions or about personal flaws in your diagnosis or execution abilities). Learning from failure also requires that you gather data that can help answer those questions and then adapt your mental models and your behavior. These activities are not natural or comfortable acts, and they are especially unnatural for successful people who have limited experience in learning how to learn from error and failure. (p. 204)

Copyright 2008 Harvard Business Press

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The value of not caring in the workplace

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I was with a company that went through lots of changes through its early history–many of them good changes. High growth, successful IPO, ultimately getting acquired for a huge sum. And of course some bad changes too–good people leaving, lots of interpersonal conflict. Early in 2000, when it looked like another tumultuous year upcoming, a senior manager that I respected a lot asked me my goals for the year. I thought for a while and then said “equanimity.”

The shock and confusion registered on his face immediately. He expected me to say “sell lots of products” or “sign up lots of new partners” or whatever, but instead I said “equanimity.” In that moment of thought I had decided I was not going to let changes and turmoil get to me, but that I would ride them out as unemotionally as I could.

And it worked. I had a really good year. Lots of changes happened, virtually all out of my control, and I dealt with them.

I was reminded of this story when viewing this video of Bob Sutton from the 50 Lessons people (I’ve been raiding their material for mistake stories recently). In the video, he talks about the genesis of “The No Asshole Rule,” his acclaimed book, but also tosses in a provocative idea at the end. When discussing advice of how someone should deal with assholes, he said: “Very often in life, there’s times when learning not to care, to be indifferent is incredibly important, and it’s something we don’t teach people enough…. If you’re in a situation where there’s nothing you can do about changing it, you might as well just ignore it and do what is best for you…. One of my goals as an adult is to get better and better at figuring out what doesn’t matter to me, and ignoring it.”

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To progress in complex environments, experiment

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I was talking to my wife tonight about a discovery I’ll call the “Mistake Bank Manifesto” which I’ll post about later. The upshot of what I was saying is that the folks who wrote the Mistake Bank Manifesto (I named it, others created it) asserted that learning from mistakes, while exceptionally useful to senior leadership teams, is often highly unnatural for very successful leaders.

I disagree, said my wife. Most of the successful people I know are very good students of failure.

So I faced a conundrum. The experts from Harvard and the Hay Group said one thing, my wife (the Vice President of Common Sense) said the opposite. So I thought on it a moment. Then: aha!

I said, successful entrepreneurs tend to be students of failure. But those who rise through a corporate hierarchy don’t confront failures often (usually the results of corporate initiatives are ambiguous at best, and invariably termed successes of some sort), so for them learning from failure is unnatural. That’s what the book was saying.

OK, I’ll agree with that, said the VP of Common Sense.

This is an exceptionally long prelude to a post today from Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge (Shawn Callahan at Anecdote has already posted a thoughtful reaction to this post) on “Coherence and Uncertainty” or, as I interpreted it, when the outcome is uncertain, try something to aim you toward your objective–in other words, experiment. (Dave calls these safe-fail probes.)

Experiments are probably worthwhile, according to Dave, when they are “coherent” (or consistent with what has happened or could happen), relatively cheap, and will provide useful learning even if they don’t succeed.

Which brings me back to the entrepreneur/corporate question. Entrepreneurs tend to have an objective, may be willing to use many different ways to reach it–but in the service of some coherent vision. Experimentation is natural for them. They usually don’t have much money. They are resilient. And they hunger to learn. Safe-fail for them is a way of life.

Corporate types? Well, no. The whole safe-fail approach is alien to the corporate environment. Heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis”? If you work in a large company you’ll hear it weekly. Creating the environment for creative experimentation will require a cultural shift in how companies view their workers and vice versa.

Who’s ready to get started?

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WorldBlu 2008 List of Democratic Workplaces released

Friday, April 25th, 2008

WorldBlu, the organization headed by friend of this blog Traci Fenton, has unveiled its second annual list of democratic workplaces.

Workplace democracy is still a rare concept, but a growing number of companies are allowing workers a voice in their company, encouraging dissent, and otherwise involving the entire employee base in shaping and running the organization. WorldBlu evaluates companies on these factors:

1. PURPOSE AND VISION
A democratic organization is clear about why it exists (its purpose) and where it is headed and what it hopes to achieve (its vision). These act as its true North, offering guidance and discipline to the organization’s direction.

2. TRANSPARENCY
Say goodbye to the “secret society” mentality. Democratic organizations are transparent and open with employees about the financial health, strategy, and agenda of the organization.

3. DIALOGUE + LISTENING
Instead of the top-down monologue or dysfunctional silence that characterizes most workplaces, democratic organizations are committed to having conversations that bring out new levels of meaning and connection.

4. FAIRNESS + DIGNITY
Democratic organizations are committed to fairness and dignity, not treating some people like “somebodies” and other people like “nobodies.”

5. ACCOUNTABILITY
Democratic organizations point fingers, not in a blaming way but in a liberating way! Democratic organizations are crystal clear about who is accountable and responsible for what.

6. INDIVIDUAL + COLLECTIVE
In democratic organizations, the individual is just as important as the whole, meaning employees are valued for their individual contribution as well as for what they do to help achieve the collective goals of the organization.

7. CHOICE
Democratic organizations thrive on giving employees meaningful choices.

8. INTEGRITY
Integrity is the name of the game, and democratic companies have a lot of it. They understand that freedom takes discipline and also doing whatÕs morally and ethically right.

9. DECENTRALIZATION
Democratic organizations distribute leadership and power across their enterprise.

10. REFLECTION + EVALUATION
Democratic organizations are committed to looking in the mirror and asking, “How can we be better?” — not just quarterly or annually, but daily.

Notable new names on the list this year include Pandora, the personalized internet radio site; BzzAgent, which creates viral marketing programs; and DaVita–the first Fortune 500 corporation that’s made the list. Holdovers include 1-800-GOT-JUNK and Linden Lab (with a brand-new CEO, will they be able to maintain their democratic principles?).

You can check out the whole list here.

Related:
Shop Talk Podcast #3 – Traci Fenton on democratic workplaces
Free information -> lateral networks -> less authoritarianism
The Utopian Company

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Bosses, choose your words carefully

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

From The Mistake Bank.

[The Mistake Bank has received permission to publish excerpts from the Harvard Business School Press/50Lessons series "Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World's Top Business Leaders," The books are full of great stories, including some very useful mistake stories. Our first is from Paul Anderson, Chairman of Spectra Energy]

As I progressed in my career and got into increasingly more responsible or powerful roles, …it was almost like my words took on the power of the position, and things that were casual before were no longer casual. I had my first example of this when I was a manager. It was fairly early in my career, and a woman named Sarah had come in. I was running a planning organization, and Sarah came in to me and said, “Look, I don’t have any background in planning—I’m from the IT group—but I would love to join your organization. I’ll work hard to learn what I need to learn to do a good job. I will strive to do anything you need done. Just give me a chance.”

I said, “Well, that sounds fair to me. Why don’t you join the organization? I’ll give you a year. At the end of the year you will either be a planner and contributing; or, if it’s not working out, you can go back to the IT group, and we’ll assume that it was a nice try but it didn’t work out.”

So she joined the organization and she was outstanding; she was the best new employee we had that year. She took on everything; she learned. She became the “go-to” person—everybody came to her with their issues. She was a star, there was just no question; she was doing an outstanding job.

And I thought, “Well, this has to be one of the best moves that I’ve ever participated in,” and I was quite comfortable that things were working out nicely. But at the end of a year, she came into my office, and she was in tears. I said, “Sarah, what’s wrong?” And she said, “Well, I don’t understand why it’s not working out. At the end of a year, you said you’d tell me if it was working out and you haven’t told me that, so I must assume that it’s not working out and I’m going to have to go back to IT.” I was flabbergasted, and of course I told her, “Hey, you’re doing a great job!”

But it struck me that I’d made a casual comment: “…in a year we’ll know.” She had gone back to her office and marked her calendar, and, by God, at the end of a year she expected me to walk into her office with a decision. That casual comment was very powerful to her, and so insignificant to me, that it really struck me that I had to be very careful in making comments as I went along.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders–Managing Your Career. Copyright (c) 2007 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the “Lessons Learned” series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.


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A new mistake story video from The Mistake Bank

Monday, March 31st, 2008

When I got overloaded at one job and was allowed to hire an assistant, I thought my troubles were over. But I had just pushed them onto my new hire, and they came back to me pretty soon.


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank


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Witnessing the "gamer disposition"

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

One of Harvard Business Review’s 2008 breakthrough ideas identified “The Gamer Disposition” as a hallmark of high-impact business performers of the future. Gamers had certain attributes (bottom-line orientation, comfort with change, etc.) that would help make them successful in business.

“The Gamer Disposition” was notable because it played against the stereotypes most businesspeople have of gamers: slackers and loners who would make low-value employees. Also, the authors, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, made the point (indirectly) that the gamer qualities were not found in many current employees.

As I’ve observed my two young gamers battle “LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga” these last two months, I’ve seen some of the gamer disposition in action. Here’s what I’ve seen:

  1. Unafraid to fail – getting terminated by Count Dooku a hundred times didn’t dissuade my guys from trying again.

  2. Do rather than research – there is no user’s manual for the game, and the kids didn’t want one. They preferred to learn by doing again and again. (Me: “How did you learn you had to drop the gate on the Rancor to kill him?” My five-year-old: shoulder shrug, “We just tried it and it worked!”)
  3. Resourceful – they’ll ask their friends how they overcome certain obstacles, and share their learnings with pride.
  4. Ever-learning – the biggest prize they get from playing the game is the ability to open up new parts of the game; to become a beginner again. Expertise isn’t that interesting to them. “What’s next?” is.

The above practices seem useful to me in navigating any complex business context. It will be interesting to see how business has changed twenty years hence, when “the gamer disposition” is no longer the exception, but the rule among employees.

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