Bob Sutton

Asshole Boss of the Year?

Bobsutton — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:38:55 -0800

There is always a lot competition for this title. But (courtesy of Gawker and a tip from Scott), Vadim Ponorovsky, who owns the restaurant Paradou in Manhattan, appears to have won the prize. Here is the email he sent to his staff, which was forwarded to Gawker:

To All,

Please read this email carefully. This is the last time we will be discussing this.

This weekend, saturday and sunday we had 451 customers. Guess how many emails we collected? 60? 80? 40? No. None of those. We, or more acurately you, collected 2 emails. Thats less than half of one percent. 2 fucking emails.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ASSHOLES?!?!?! How many times do we have to tell you how important it is that you collect emails. Everytime we have a slow night and you make no money and you sit there bitching about how you make no money, remember its because youre fucking lazy motherfuckers. YOU SHOULD ALL BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY!!!!! ALL OF YOU, INCLUDING THE HOSTS!!!!

Let me guess, youre probably sitting there saying "Vadim is such a fucking asshole. How dare he speak to me like this. I dont need this." Youre right, you dont, so why dont you get the fuck out. Any and all of you.

Youre probably sitting there saying "How dare he speak to me like this. How dare he not have respect for me". Youre right there also. I have absolutely no respect for any of you. Why? Because every fucking day, all of you continue to show that you have absolutely no respect for me or Alex. So if you dont respect us enough to do the little that we ask you to do, then GET THE FUCK OUT YOU FUCKING LAZY DISRESPECTFUL ASSHOLES!!!!!

Effective immediately, any server or host who fails to collect at least 20 emails per week, will be fined $100. Anyone failing to collect at least 20 emails for two weeks in a month will be fired immediately. No matter what. No matter who you are.

You dont want to do your job, you dont want to do what we ask, you dont belong at Paradou. Go find another place to work.

How dare you disrespect Alex and me this way. How dare you completely ignore what we ask of you time after time after time.

I am sick of all this shit, you bunch of fucking children. This is what I have to deal with at 6AM?!?!? I wouldnt tolerate this from my 13 year old, and Im sure as shit not going to tolerate it from any of you assholes.

You give no respect, you get 10 times back.

If you can top that, let me know.

P.S. There are all sorts of subsequent actions here, from a defense by the owner (with more F words and a claim that he practicing Reagonomics) and apparently there are death threats against him. See here, here, and here.

The Tension Between Getting it Done and Getting it Right

Bobsutton — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:11:14 -0800

I just went for a rather lovely long bike ride in the rain and was in a contemplative mood because I seem to be just a couple days from finishing my next book (I will tell you much more about it in a couple weeks when the powers that be agree with me that it is done). When I got back, I had received an email from Randall who gave me feedback that, in my foreword to 40th Anniversary edition of the The Peter Principle:

"I am disappointed that your forward did not mention what I believe to be the core insight in the book. Without this particular insight, the rest of the book would have been nonsense: Competence is defined by your boss, who may or may not be competent themselves. In particular, I have found the observation that competent bosses value output and incompetent bosses value input to be immutable."

As I thought about Randall's feedback, my reaction was that, although I do not see this as a fatal flaw (you never can put everything that people think is important in anything, or you end-up with something like Microsoft Word), that the forward would have been stronger if I had mentioned his point.

Then,I went to look to see if there were any comments on my last post on "Leaders get the behavior that they display and tolerate," and there was more thoughtful feedback about how I might written something better, this time a suggestion that I remove the opening and reword the post. And, again, I found the feedback useful and agree with Recruiting Animal that his apporach would have probably been better.

This led me to start worrying about my book. I fretted, what if after about 18 months of working on it nearly every day and rewriting it over and over, having the hell edited of it, and getting feedback from people I trust, I still left something major out of it -- or have sentences and paragraphs that still suck? Then, calm washed over me when I remembered what my (now 91 year-old) dissertation adviser Bob Kahn told me some 30 years ago. Bob warned that my entire career, I would always have to deal with the tension between getting things right and getting things done. That if I was too quick and sloppy, people would find my work useless and tiresome. But if I was too much of a perfectionist, I wouldn't get very much done.

Walking this tightrope is never easy. I guess I apply standards that vary depending on whether it is a blog post (this one will take about 20 minutes, I will proof it once, and no doubt, it will be as imperfect as the last one), a foreword or article (I worked on the first draft for the Peter Principle for perhaps two weeks, and then perhaps another day or two in response to editing), or a book (as I said, my current one will take a good 18 months and I have written books that took as long as 4 years and I have started at least three books that I never finished).

I know that I will always struggle to get this balance right yet but never will. I also know that no matter how hard I try to make things perfect, there will always be flaws, there will always be things I wish I could go back and change, and there will always be people I can't please no matter how hard I try. That is every author's lot in life, as well as anyone else who does creative work -- from programming, to product design, to management consulting, to playing and writing music, to architecture, to hair styling, to leadership, to scientific experiments.

I know that a lot of readers of this blog do creative work. I wonder, how do you strike this balance? How do you decide when it is time to toss your ideas out out into the world?

P.S. I also want to take this chance to thank Randall and the Recruiting Animal for the comments, they were both very thoughtful. Please, anyone and everyone, don't hesitate to let me know when you have ideas about things I could have done better -- and to Nicolay to catching my "forward" error.

Leaders get the behavior they display and tolerate

Bobsutton — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:38:43 -0800

I was at a gathering of HR managers and executives yesterday held at Pixar, and one of the participants made this observation at one point. Frankly, there were a lot of people and we kept rotating among groups, so although I write it down quickly so I wouldn't lose it, I got so lost in thought about it that by the time I looked-up, we were all rotating to different groups and I lost rack of who said it. I will try to figure out who it was -- yes, it is an oversimplification, but one of the most compelling ones I've heard. I especially like that word "tolerate" as it conveys the subtle notion that there are often many things that happen in the workplaces that bosses don't try to discourage or stop because they have so much other stuff to do, they don't know how to go about stopping it, they believe they have more pressing matters to deal with, or they just don't have the emotional energy to deal with.

Then, I started thinking about this quote again when I was watching The Office last night and saw how the tolerant Jim (now co-manager) brilliantly dealt with a level of defiance and screwing around by Ryan that he couldn't tolerate by assigning him to an office in closet (see the episode here on Hulu).

Oh, So That Is God's Work

Bobsutton — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:01:41 -0800

Today's New York Times has an encouraging article about the things that Goldman Sachs is doing to cleanse its image as a greedy and destructive force in the U.S. economy and society. Apparently Warren Buffett is teach their senior team a bit of humility, or at least how to feign it.

This is all old news, but I can't stop thinking about the comparison between how the Rolling Stone described Goldman versus how CEO Blankfein did (a statement that got him in big trouble, by the way).

In July, a story in the Rolling Stone called "The Great American Bubble Machine" started out:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

In contrast, here is what Goldman CEO was quoted as saying about his job in The Times of London last week: 'I'm doing God's work."

I am really trying to avoid the temptation to engage in mindless bashing of Goldman Sachs as I have met many people from the company I admire and in many ways it is splendidly managed company. But the thing that gnaws at me can be gleaned from the Kurt Vonnegut poem that was published in The No Asshole Rule and that I have reprinted on this blog, called Joe Heller (read it here). When people act if no matter how much money, status, goodies, and other material goods pile-up, it is never enough for them, I start to squirm. I am glad that Goldman is reaching out to help small business , offering some 3% of their 16.7 billion in bonuses to do so. That is a start. My gut feeling is that something closer to 50% would be more appropriate --- especially for the top 100 or so people in the firm. But I think they ought to read Vonnegut's poem, as it is a message they need to hear -- especially at a time when over 10% of the U.S. workforce is unemployed, most of whom shelled-out tax money to help save Goldman and their ilk from their own greed, arrogance, and misleading statements -- a new government report rebukes their claim that they didn't much benefit much at all from the massive AIG bailout (see this story in the Wall Street Journal).

I am glad that Goldman is starting to grovel a bit and is giving a bit more back after their arrogance failed them, but I would I think they owe their fellow Americans more than a lousy 3%. I know they will be paying whopping taxes on all this money, but for me, they need to do more to help all those people who saved their ass.

Testosterone Levels, Top Dogs, and Collective Group Confidence

Bobsutton — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:00:38 -0800

My favorite behavioral science website, BPS Research Digest, posted a summary of an amazingly weird and rather troubling psychological experiment. The upshot is that people --- both men and women --- vary in testosterone levels and (no surprise), when people with high testosterone levels aren't in leadership positions, "they can find it stressful and uncomfortable when denied the status that they crave." A bit more surprising is that the reverse is true as well, that "people low in testosterone find it uncomfortable to be placed in positions of authority." The main finding from the research is that when groups suffer from "mismatch" between status and testosterone levels (where those with high testosterone levels are placed at the bottom of the pecking order, and those with low levels are placed at the top), the group has less confidence in its abilities get things done. I quote from the BPS summary:

Michael Zyphur and colleagues assigned 92 groups of between 4 and 7 undergrads to an on-going task that involved meeting twice a week for 12 weeks, and included creating a professional management-training video. Six weeks into the project the researches measured the participants' testosterone levels via saliva samples. They also asked all members in each group to vote on each others' status. Then six weeks after that, at the end of the project, the researchers measured each group's collective efficacy by summing members' confidence in their group's ability to succeed.

The key finding was that groups made up of members whose status was out of synch with their testosterone level tended to have the lowest collective efficacy. The researchers think that testosterone-status mismatch within a group probably has a detrimental effect on that group's collective confidence. However, another possibility, which they acknowledge, is that a lack of group confidence leads to a mismatch between testosterone levels and status among group members.

The implication is fairly horrifying --- perhaps companies will start using testosterone levels to make decisions about whether or not to put people in leadership positions. Even if it is "evidence-based" (although these results are preliminary), the thought makes me a bit sick.

Here is the reference:

Zyphur, M., Narayanan, J., Koh, G., & Koh, D. (2009). Testosterone–status mismatch lowers collective efficacy in groups: Evidence from a slope-as-predictor multilevel structural equation model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110 (2), 70-79.

How Can You Help Your Boss Succeed?

Bobsutton — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:29:41 -0800

Many of the posts and comments on this blog focus on either how to be an effective boss or how to deal with a lousy boss. No doubt, all this talk about dealing with lousy bosses is fueled by The No Asshole Rule. But there is another theme that I believe deserves more attention here and elsewhere: How can people help their bosses be more successful? After all, when your boss succeeds, not only does he or she gain a better reputation, so do you, and it also usually means your team is doing better work. I was reminded of this last week when a I gave a talk to a group of HP managers and executives. Right before my talk, they were doing an ice-breaking exercise, and as the groups reported-out, one suggested a great guideline for everyone

“The way in which I can earn success is by driving success to those around me."

I later found out that this quote came from Geoff Heath, who is a Senior Experience Designer and Information Architect. He explained in a subsequent email:

'I like to summarize that to my superiors by telling them “It’s my job to make you successful."'

I think that is a lovely and very constructive sentiment, but perhaps most useful as a kick-off to a more specific conversation. So, I'd like to ask: what can you do to make your boss more successful? I realize this will ultimately be a very long list. But I suggest two things for starters:

1. We all owe it to our bosses to give them feedback about their performance, especially negative feedback -- unless and until they demonstrate they aren't adult enough to hear it.
2. We all ought to assume the best about our bosses' motivations and intentions, as most bosses really do intend to do their jobs in ways that spark performance and allow their people to work with dignity. Of course, some bosses ultimately demonstrate this isn't the case, but it is destructive for everyone if you always assume the worst about your boss -- indeed, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that renders a competent boss incompetent.

These are just two quick ideas, I would love to hear more.

My Challenge to GM: A Change You Need to Make If You Really Want Cultural Change

Bobsutton — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:56:45 -0800

Today's New York Times has a very encouraging article about the cultural and organizational changes that are happening at GM in the wake of their bankruptcy. I was simply delighted to read about changes like this, where GM is finally beginning to tackle what Jeff Pfeffer and I call "The Otis Redding Problem."

In the old General Motors, employees were evaluated according to a “performance measurement process” that could fill a three-ring binder. In Terry Woychowski’s case, for example, his job as director of G.M.’s vehicle engineers was spelled out in exhaustive detail, and evaluated every three months. But in his new job as vice president — a promotion he was given 20 days after G.M. emerged from bankruptcy — his performance review will be boiled down to a single page, something he had never seen in his 29 years with the company.Mr. Woychowski said he felt the grip of G.M.’s legendary bureaucracy start to loosen, something he never imagined possible. Now, such reviews are being scaled down and simplified across the company. “We measured ourselves ten ways from Sunday,” he said. “But as soon as everything is important, nothing is important.”

As regular readers of this blog may recall, last November, I wrote a rather scathing post on GM's "no we can't mindset" in which I argued that GM's core competence seemed to be coming-up with reasons about why the couldn't stop doing seemingly dumb old things and start doing seemingly smart new things. I provided quite specific suggestions that stemmed from my now nearly 30 years of intermittent contact with diverse parts of the company. I am not especially good at figuring out the impact of different posts, but from the number of page views, number of comments, and the strength of the emotional reactions to it, I think this post had more impact than anything else ever written here. This Times article suggests that they are making real progress and committed to making more.

In that spirit, I have a pet peeve that I have been complaining about openly and repeatedly to GM managers and executives about for years. This is a change I believe they can and should make immediately, and that will help reverse two of GM's biggest cultural problems:

1. Management and senior executives don't quite understand and are insulated from the experience of owning and buying a GM car -- and how it stacks-up against their competitors.

2. They think and act like too much like they are just selling cars, when in fact, they are selling a car ownership experience -- yes, the car itself is an important part, but there are many other parts such as shopping for a car, buying it, having it serviced, and so on that are treated as separate and less important.

To me the single most destructive thing they do to themselves is to have a program -- one they still have -- where managers and executives are given a free GM car to drive. I have heard a lot about bits and pieces of this program over the years, but I confess to not knowing every detail. My understanding, as I wrote last November, is that it goes something like this:

GM has a perk for managers down to fairly low levels where all are given a GM car to drive – they rotate from one car to another. I am not sure of the exact details, but answers to the questions I’ve asked over the years suggest it goes something like this: the lowest level managers have to buy their own cars, the ones at somewhat higher levels get a new car to drive every six months or so but have to do some servicing, the managers who are somewhat higher-up get somewhat fancier cars and are freed from any servicing (gas is even put in the cars of some executives so they don’t have to go to the service station), and the highest level executives get a car and a driver.

In other words, this system effectively insulates people in management – especially those in senior management -- from experiencing what it is like to shop for, bargain for, purchase, service, and sell a car. They only get the driving experience. Well, except for the most senior executives, who don’t even get that experience -- they watch a person in the front seat drive a big car. Now, it is true, that the most senior executives do own GM cars for personal use, but it is my understanding that when a car is delivered to a senior executive, special attention is devoted to the car – even during the production process –to make sure the top brass aren’t exposed to a car with any flaws. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Here is my challenge to GM, and frankly, since you are running on U.S. taxpayer money, my money and the money of millions of us who would rather see the money going to things like education, I think that you owe to us -- and yourself -- to do the right thing:

1. Get rid of the program immediately.

2. Use the money spent on the program (even though I know it won't have the tax advantages of the old program) to give each manager and executive money to help buy a car for work --- they only get the money if they buy a car.

3. Get rid of the GM employee discount program completely, so that when managers and execs walk into a GM dealer, they have to do the same negotiation as everyone else.

4. Stipulate that not only can people buy non GM cars, only 25% of those participating in the program at any time can own a GM car. That way, there will be information in the company about the experience of owning a wide range of cars.

5. Everyone -- from the CEO on down -- will be required to partake in the full car ownership experience, from selecting, to shopping for, to servicing, to getting gas, to selling and trading in their cars.

There are a lot of other things about GM that need to change -- or more optimistically --- perhaps are already are changing. See this amazing story provided by Matt May about how badly their managers sometimes listen. But I believe that this single change will have a large and positive impact, forcing GM management and executives to break out of their isolation, to learn about competitors' car and car buying experiences, and to come to grips with what the GM ownership experience actually entails.

Dear GM Executives: you know these problems exist, you know that this program contributes to these problems, and you are at a juncture in your history where change is possible. Why can't you end this program immediately? Rather than falling back on your old core competence of explaining why it is impossible for you to do the right thing, how about showing the American taxpayer and yourself too that it is possible for you to do the right thing and to do it fast?

Leading Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

Bobsutton — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:40:57 -0800

As I blogged about awhile back, this week, Perry Klebhan, Alex Kazaks ,Huggy Rao and I are running rather intense executive program called Customer-Focused Innovation. As you can see from the schedule, we are keeping the 21 executives in the program mighty busy. We kicked off with a tire-changing exercise led by Andy Papa, who among other things leads the pit crews at Hendrick's Motor Sports, where one team established the all time CFI speed record, changing in a tire on a NASCAR racing car in under 13 seconds. Yesterday, the group spent the day at the Tesla dealer in Menlo Park talking to owners, potential customers, people in sales and marketing at Tesla, and people who didn't like the idea of owning a Tesla at all. In the picture above, the two executives on the left are interviewing George Kembel, the d.school's executive director (he is the tall guy facing the camera) and the group on the right is interviewing one of the Tesla salespeople (the woman in black with sunglasses in her hair).

The idea is to use their observations, empathy for others, and identified needs to develop prototype solutions to improve the Tesla car ownership experience. The group focuses on cases, theories, and models in the mornings, and applying design thinking in the Tesla project in the afternoon. It is a lively and motivated group, and we all are very curious to see the suggestions and prototypes they offer to Tesla executives on Thursday.

Huggy Rao and I kicked off yesterday morning by doing case discussions and a bit of lecture on the hallmarks of innovative organizations. As part of that session, I put together the list below for the executives. I've also included links for anyone who wants to dig into the subject a bit further. I will add a few more ideas and links during the course of the week. I would love to hear some additional ways that great bosses spark innovation and comments -- and extensions -- on the ideas below.

Leading Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

1. Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

2. Treat innovation as an import-export business. Keep trying to bring in ideas from outside your group or organization, keep trying to show and tell others about your ideas, and blend them all together.

3. Look for and build “intersections” places where people with diverse ideas gather together. And when you go there, talk to the people you don’t know, who have ideas you know nothing about, and ideas you find weird, don’t like, or useless.

4. Treat your beliefs as “strong opinions, weakly held.”

5. Learn how to listen, watch, and keep your mouth shut.

6. Say “I don’t know” on a regular basis.

7. Have the courage to act on what you know, and the humility to doubt your beliefs and actions.

8. Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.

9. Make it safe for people to take risky actions and “fail forward,” by developing a “forgive and remember culture.”

10. Encourage people to learn from others’ failures – it is faster, easier, and less painful.

11. Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”

12. Hire people who make your squirm.

13. Create teams composed of both experts and novices.

14. Make it safe for people to fight as if they are right, and listen as if they wrong.

15. Encourage your people to be “happy worriers.”

16. Sometimes, the best management is no management at all. Know when and how to get out of the way.

17. Have the confidence and resolve to make tough decisions, stop your people from whining about the decisions made, and to get on with implementing them.

18. Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.

19. Innovation entails creativity + implementation. Developing or finding a great idea is useless if you can't implement it or sell it to someone who believes they can.

20. Remember Rao’s Recipe for Innovation: Will +Ideas + Tools.

21. Innovation requires selling your ideas. The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales. If you can't or won't sell, team-up with someone who can.

As I edited this list a bit, I realized it is important to remind people that there is a lot about innovation that sucks. Yes, it is necessary, but innovator beware, it is an inefficient and distressing process plagued by a high failure rate -- and a lot of self-delusion. And that is when you are doing it right!

Sources: Huggy Rao’s book Market Rebels, Bob Sutton’s book Weird Ideas that Work, and Bob Sutton’s blog Work Matters (www.bobsutton.net).

When is the change going to be over?

Bobsutton — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:54:33 -0800

An executive my wife knows reported one of her people recently asked her this question. The last couple years have been tough on all of of us, and especially tough on people who had assumed that the future would be an imitation of the past. Of course, the answer is that the change will never be over. More so than ever, a boss's job is to prepare his or her people by developing expectations that there will be constant change, while (as I wrote in HBR), providing as much prediction, understanding, control, and compassion as possible.

I wonder, what else can a boss do to help people anticipate, cope with, and flourish in the face of change?

The Baboon Troop that Mellowed Out After the Alpha Males Died

Bobsutton — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:35:57 -0800

I got an email last night from a former student (thanks Hendrick!) who wanted to let me know that Stanford's Robert Sapolsky had done a WNYC radio show called "New Normal?" (listen here) where he described his 2004 article with Lisa Share on a troop of baboons -- which became more peaceful (or at least less nasty) after the alpha males died. It is amazing stuff, and more evidence that being a jerk and having power go hand in hand. Here is a link to the original academic article (which I was able to download for free). It is short and quite accessible, and just astounding stuff: Here is how I described it in The No Asshole Rule:

Biologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share have followed a troop of wild baboons in Kenya for over 20 years, starting in 1978. Sapolsky and Share called them “The Garbage Dump Troop” because they got much of their food from a garbage pit at a tourist lodge. But not every baboon was allowed to eat from the pit in the early 1980s: The aggressive, high status males in the troop refused to allow lower status males, or any females, to eat the garbage. Between 1983 and 1986, infected meat from the dump led to the deaths of 46% of the adult males in the troop. The biggest and meanest males died off. As in other baboon troops studied, before they died, these top-ranking males routinely bit, bullied, and chased males of similar and lower status, and occasionally directed their aggression at females.

But when the top ranking males died-off in the mid-1980s, aggression by the (new) top baboons dropped dramatically, with most aggression occurring between baboons of similar rank, and little of it directed toward lower-status males, and none at all directed at females. Troop members also spent a larger percentage of the time grooming, sat closer together than in the past, and hormone samples indicated that the lowest status males experienced less stress than underlings in other baboon troops. Most interestingly, these effects persisted at least through the late 1990’s, well after all the original “kinder” males had died-off. Not only that, when adolescent males who grew up in other troops joined the “Garbage Dump Troop,” they too engaged in less aggressive behavior than in other baboon troops. As Sapolsky put it “We don’t understand the mechanism of transmission… but the jerky new guys are obviously learning: We don’t do things like that around here.” So, at least by baboon standards, the garbage dump troop developed and enforced what I would call a “no asshole rule.”

I am not suggesting that you get rid of all the alpha males in your organization, as tempting as that may be at times. The lesson from the baboons is that when the social distance between higher and lower status mammals in a group are reduced, and steps are taken to keep the distance smaller, higher status members are less likely to act like jerks. Human leaders can use this lesson to avoid turning into mean, selfish, and insensitive jerks too. Despite all the trappings, some leaders do remain attuned to how people around them are really feeling, to what their employees really believe about how the organization is ran, and to what customers really think about their company’s products and services. As “The Garbage Dump Troop” teaches us, the key thing these leaders do is to take potent, and constant, steps that dampen rather amplify the power differences between themselves and others (both inside and outside the company).

Any reactions? What do you think the implications for implementing the no asshole rule?

P.S. I seem to have a bit of an obsession with power dynamics in baboon troops, you may recall this post called Of Baboons and Bosses, on how lower status troop members glance at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds.

Intuition vs. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Some Rough Ideas

Bobsutton — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:22:50 -0800

A Stanford undergraduate doing a case analysis on using intuition versus systematic analysis wrote me an email last night to get my thoughts on the difference between the two, especially in light of the work that Jeff Pfeffer and I did on evidence-based management. Below is my lightly edited response. This is just off the top of my head (is it mostly intuition?). I would love to hear your thoughts on this distinction -- if it is useful, how the two concepts fit together, when one is more useful than the others, and so on:

I don't think that intuition and evidence-based management are at odds. There are many times when decision-makers don't have very good data because something is new, the situation has changed (e.g., where do you invest money right now?), or because what might seem like intuition is really mindless well-rehearsed behavior that comes from years of experience at something, so even though people can't articulate the pattern they recognize, they still are acting on a huge body of experience and knowledge. And on the very other side of experience there are virtues to the gut reaction of naive people, as those who are not properly brainwashed may see things and come up with ideas that expertise drives out of their brains (e.g, that is why Jane Goodall was hired to observe chimps, in part, because she knew nothing).

The trouble with intuition is that we now have a HUGE pile of research on cognitive biases and related flaws in decision-making that show "gut feelings" are highly suspect. Look-up confirmation bias --- people have a very hard time believing and remember evidence that contradicts their beliefs. There is also the fallacy of centrality, a lot more obscure, but important in that people -- especially those in authority -- believe that if something important happens, they will know about it.

My belief -- and it is only partially evidence-based -- is that intuition works best in the hands of wise people (this is all over hard facts), when people have the mindset to "act on their beliefs, while doubting what they know," so that they are always looking for contradictory evidence, encouraging those around them to challenge what they believe, and constantly updating (but always moving forward), then I think that intuition -- or acting on incomplete information, hunches, conclusions -- is right. Here is one place I've talked about it. Brad Bird of Pixar is a good example of someone with this mindset, as we learned when we interviewed him for the McKinsey Quarterly. So is Andy Grove. I think the most interesting cases to look at are those where people with a history of good guesses or gut decisions -- what mistakes has Steve Jobs made? What about Google... indeed, it is interesting that they believed they were going to crush Firefox with Chrome , but their market share remains modest a year later. My point here isn't to say anything negative about Jobs or Google -- they have impressive track records, plus some history of the usual failures that all humans and human organizations suffer from. Rather, my point is that by looking at errors by people and firms that have generally good track records, you can learn a lot about conditions under which judgment fails, because you can rule out the explanation that they generally suffer from judgment.

There is a lot written on intuition and the related topic of quick assessments --- see Blink -- and some evidence (although Gladwell exaggerates about the virtues of snap judgments, as the best are often made by people with much experience in the domain, but as always he makes wonderful points). Also see this book by David Myers for a balanced and evidenced perspective on intuition.

My view is that intuition and analysis are not opposing perspectives, but tag team partners that, under the best conditions, where hunches are followed and then evaluated with evidence (both quantitative and qualitative, that is another issue, qualitative data are different than intuition, and often better) versus when hunches and ingrained behaviors are mindlessly followed and impervious to clear signs that they are failing.

Work Matters readers: Again, I would appreciate your thoughts, as this is one of those core challenges for every boss and for a lot of behavioral scientists too!

I Am Just Like You

Bobsutton — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:31:08 -0700

A few days back, I wrote about David Dunning's book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we might be at things and our awareness of how others see us. Dunning points out that a host of studies show that one major impediment to self-awareness is that people see themselves as unique -- usually as superior to others -- when that actually are not: as more ethical, emotionally complex, skilled, and so on. Dunning proposes on page 166 that:

"People would hold more accurate self-perceptions if they conceded that their psychology is not different from the the psychology of others, that their actions are molded by the same situational forces that govern the behavior of other people. In doing so, they could more readily learn from the experiences of others, using data about other people's outcomes to forecast their own."

I find this quite fascinating. I believe that the average person would benefit from this perspective, but some industries would suffer -- especially those that have a kind of Ponzi scheme quality where most people fail, a rare successes happens now and then, but no matter what happens, the people who run the system always seem to benefit. Both casino operators and venture capitalists come to mind.

The implication, however, that if we assume "I am just like you" rather than "I am special and different," or even that "we are all the same," we might make better decisions and learn at others' expense rather than our own strikes me as a lesson that could be quite valuable. For example, I've been rather obsessed about the virtues and drawback of learning from others mistakes rather than your own (see this post on Randy Komisar and Eleanor Roosevelt), as this question has huge implications about how to teach people new skills and the best way to develop competent and caring human-beings.

Reducing Interruptions and Saving Lives: New Study on Drug Treatment Errors

Bobsutton — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:21:29 -0700

I have written here and other places on Amy Edmondson's wonderful research on how, when nurses feel as if they have psychological safety, they openly talk about and try to correct drug treatment errors, but when they work in a climate of fear, they are afraid to even admit when they have made mistakes -- which led to a rather bizarre finding in Amy's early research that in nursing units where people felt safe, even compelled,to talk about and learn from mistakes, they reported ten times more errors than in a nursing unit where the supervisor slammed nurses who admitted or where "caught" making mistakes.

This morning's San Francisco Chronicle reports an equally fascinating study on reducing drug treatment errors. This one focuses on the evils of interruptions, which as research by Gloria Mark shows, slows and undermines performance, and creates great job stress. As the article reports "A UCSF program to improve accuracy in administering drugs - with particular emphasis on reducing interruptions that often lead to mistakes - resulted in a nearly 88 percent drop in errors over 36 months at the nine Bay Area hospitals, according to results being released today." The cool thing about the article is that the nurses at different hospitals invented different local methods for reducing interruptions, to the vest you see pictured above to covering windows so colleagues couldn't see them (and thus run in and interrupt them), to developing quiet zones, or quiet times during drug administration. Note that drug treatment errors are huge problem, resulting in over 400,000 preventable injuries per year and 3.5 billion in costs. So a 88% reduction is huge.

This research is also fascinating to me because it shows how, so often, when people say they are too busy, don't have enough money, or their will be resistance to change that these are excuses, or worse yet, negative self-fulfilling prophecies. In particular, I think that people -- especially managers -- often use spending money as a substitute for thinking, when inexpensive and low-tech solutions work just fine. I am looking forward to digging into this research further.

Flawed Self-Evaluations: David Dunning's Facinating Work

Bobsutton — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:19:17 -0700

Professor David Dunning from Cornell University, along with numerous colleagues, has done fascinating and sometimes discouraging research on self-awareness. His most famous paper on the topic was published in 1999 with Kruger ... check-out the abstract of Unskilled and Unaware of it. I have known about it for a long time, but I have just discovered Dunning's book, Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself. This is a pretty pure academic book, but it sure is fascinating, and should make all of us stop and pause when we feel supremely confident about ourselves. You can learn tidbits like people do a pretty bad job of guessing their IQ scores, are downright awful at rating their ability to catch other people's lies, that workers do a far worse job of assessing their own social skills than their superiors or peers, that in survey of thousands of high school seniors 70% of respondents rated their leadership ability as above average while only 2% rated their leadership ability as below average, and -- turning to my own profession -- that 94% of college professors say they do above average work.

Self-Insight also contains an update of research for the 1999 article -- the basic finding is that people with worst skill levels at diverse tasks (ranging from debating skill to having a good sense of humor) consistently overestimate their abilities by huge amounts. For example, people who had skill levels at the 12th or 13th percentile usually estimated that they were in the 60th percentile of performance. In contrast, people above the 50th percentile made far more accurate assessments -- although the most skilled people tended to underestimate their relative skill a bit.

The upshot of this rather famous work is that you should be wary of self-assessments in general, but especially wary of people who seem to be incompetent. As Dunning puts it, "The central contention guiding this research is that poor performers simply do not know -- indeed cannot know -- how badly they are performing. Because they lack the skills required to produce correct answers they also lack the skills to accurately judge whether their own answers are correct."

The book has all sorts of great research and I found it a lot more fun to read than most academic books, but be warned that it contains a lot of studies and such.

Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research

Bobsutton — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:42:07 -0700

I recently wrote about how the "talent wars" are likely to be returning soon in the U.S. (and indeed, there are signs they have already returned in places like China and Singapore), and how companies that have treated people well during the downturn will have an advantage in keeping and retaining the best people --and those that have not damn well better change their ways or will face the prospect of their best people running for the exits in concert with the inability to attract the best people. A related question has to do with the problem of determining who the best people might be -- what does the best evidence say about the best way to pick new people?

Its is always dangerous to say there is one definitive paper or study on any subject, but in this case there is candidate -- a paper I have blogged about before when taking on graphology (handwriting analysis). But there is one article that just might qualify. It was published by Frank Schmidt and the late John Hunter in the Psychological Bulletin in 1998. These two very skilled researchers analyzed the pattern of relationships observed in peer reviewed journals during the prior 85 years to identify which employee selection methods were best and worst as predictors of job performance. They used a method called "meta-analysis" to do this, which they helped to develop and spread. The advantage of this method is -- in the hands of skilled researchers like Schmidt and Hunter -- is it reveals the overall patterns revealed by the weight of evidence, rather than the particular quirks of any single study.

The upshot of this research is that work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can actually do key elements of a job -- if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ), general mental ability (IQ and related tests), and structured interviews had the highest validity of all methods examined (Arun, thanks for the corrections). As Arun also suggests, Schmidt and Hunter point out that three combinations of methods that were the most powerful predictors of job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (in other words, hiring someone smart and seeing if they could do the work), GMA plus an integrity test, and GMA plus a structured interview (but note that unstructured interviews, the way they are usually done, are weaker).

Note that this information about combinations is probably more important than the pure rank ordering, as it shows what blend of methods works best, but here is also the rank order of the 19 predictors examined, rank ordered by the validity coefficient, an indicator of how strongly the individual method is linked to performance:

1. Work sample tests (.54)

2. GMA tests ..."General mental ability" (.51)

3. Employment interviews -- structured (.51)

4. Peer ratings (.49)

5. Job knowledge tests (.48) Test to assess how much employees know about specific aspects of the job.

6. T & E behavioral consistency method (.45) "Based on the principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. In practice, the method involves describing previous accomplishments gained through work, training, or other experience (e.g., school, community service, hobbies) and matching those accomplishments to the competencies required by the job. a method were past achievements that are thought to be important to behavior on the job are weighted and score

7. Job tryout procedure (.44) Where employees go through a trial period of doing the entire job.

8. Integrity tests (.41) Designed to assess honesty ... I don't like them but they do appear to work.

9. Employment interviews -- unstructured (.38)

10. Assessment centers (.37)

11. Biographical data measures(.35)

12. Conscientiousness tests (.31) Essentially do people follow through on their promises, do what they say, and work doggedly and reliably to finish their work.

13. Reference checks (.26)

14. Job experience --years (.18)

15. T & E point method (.11)

16. Years of education (.10)

17. Interests (.10)

18. Graphology (.02) e.g., handwriting analysis.

19. Age (-01)

Certainly, this rank-ordering does not apply in every setting. It is also important to recall that there is a lot of controversy about IQ, with many researchers now arguing that it is more malleable than previously thought. But I find it interesting to see what doesn't work very well -- years of education and age in particular. And note that unstructured interviews, although of some value, are not an especially powerful method, despite their widespread use. Interviews are strange in that people have excessive confidence in them, especially in their own abilities to pick winners and losers -- when in fact the real explanation is that most of us have poor and extremely self-serving memories.

Many of these methods are described in more detail here by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Also note that I am not proposing that any boss or company just mindlessly apply this rank ordering, but I think it is useful to see the research.

The reference for this article is:

Schmidt, F.L. & Hunter, J.E. (1998) The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings,” Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262–274.

P.S. Note the corrections, thanks Arun!

d.school Alum Laura Jones Selected by BusinessWeek as one of "21 People Who Will Change Business"

Bobsutton — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:58:03 -0700

I just got a note that Laura Jones, who now works for Visa on innovation initiatives, was selected by BusinessWeek as one of 21 People Who Will Change Business. We were lucky enough to have Laura in our class on Creating Infectious Action class about two years ago, and I agree that Laura has the zest for life, smarts, and determination -- plus the leadership skills -- to change business or anything else. That is Laura (on the left, you can see her energy) during our first day of class, developing prototypes to improve dental hygiene. I still remember the first time met Laura, and was rather amazed to hear her say that the reason she applied to the Stanford Business School was she wanted to take d.school classes, and the great work she has done at the d.school and at the business school has apparently been noticed. Congratulations to Laura and take this coverage as a good sign for design thinking and for the value of the perspective that the d.school offers. I look forward to hearing about the work that Laura is doing at Visa.

More Jargon Monoxide: A Lovely BBC Story Adds to the Pile

Bobsutton — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:02:51 -0700

One of the themes I can't resist posting about is the horrible language used in business. It has been especially fun since I heard Polly LaBarre call the whole mess, "Jargon Monoxide," one of the best phrases I have ever heard in my life. I wrote a later post on terms that make me squirm, where I complained about value added, leverage, and core competence. Most recently, we had some fun, and expressed some disgust, talking about euphemisms for layoffs, which -- thanks to your comments -- produced such gems as "fitness plans," "offboarded" (I see a picture of someone walking the plank in mind's eye), "He got the box," and the differences between management language "Your position is redundant" or "rationalizing," versus employees language like "He got shit canned" or "he got whacked."

The ever helpful Dave sent me a great BBC article today that continues the tradition of cataloging jargon monoxide. It is called 50 Office Speak Phrases You Love To Hate. I don't want to spoil your fun by listing too many, but I especially loved to hate "ideas showers," "we need a holistic cradle-to-grave approach," "granularity," and a truly wonderful sentence that a university sent out to its staff after a round of layoffs "We are assessing and mitigating immediate impacts, and developing a high-level overview to help frame the conversation with our customers and key stakeholders."

I believe the translation of that sentence is "We are trying to figure out what the hell to do next."

Let me know if you have any new favorites that might be added to the BBC article.

P.S. Dave, thanks again.

Former CEO Richard S. Fuld of Lehman Brothers: A Striking Picture

Bobsutton — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:42:56 -0700

Do You Learn More from Working for a Bad Boss than a Good Boss?

Bobsutton — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:00:21 -0700

Bad bosses suck, as I often document here. Of course, you knew that anyway -- many of you know it all too well from first hand experience. But perhaps they do more good than I have given them credit for in the past. Carol Bartz, the feisty, tough, unusually plain-speaking CEO of Yahoo! (see this earlier post or this story), makes an intriguing point about bad bosses in today's New York Times that is weirdly related to my recent post On Noticing That You Don't Notice. Here is the link to the interview, and the argument I found especially intriguing:

I also think people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine.

When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?”

There are several elements of this comment that made me stop and think. The first follows from my post on not noticing, as the implication is that when things are going great, you don't engage in very deep cognition about them, because little is happening to give you pause or upset you. In fact, this point is consistent with research on cognition and emotion suggesting that people in good moods do not engage in as much mindfulness,deep thought, or self-doubt as people in bad moods.

The second thing that intrigues me is as I thought about some of the more interesting bosses I've been reading about and communicating with, I've ran into quite a few who make a related argument. Perhaps most famous is the late Robert Townsend, author of the still amazing Up the Organization, who argued repeatedly that he learned how to be a good boss at American Express because his bosses were so bad and the company was so badly ran that he learned what not to do -- very close to Bartz's point. Even closer is an amazing comment I posted here a couple years ago from a surgeon, who during his residency at a prestigious hospital, got together with fellow residents every week to vote on the senior or "attending" surgeon who most deserved the "asshole of the week" award -- and wrote in a journal that had been passed down from generation to generation of residents. The great thing about this story is that he his fellow residents all vowed not to be assholes when they became more senior, and all -- who now hold prestigious appointments through the country -- have all worked to try to keep that vow.

Now, as much as I love Bartz's thought process, I do disagree with her that when people have a lousy boss and want to escape, she tells them " You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something."

That bugged me for two reasons. The first is that, if these complaints are about a lousy boss who reports to Carol, it is her job to do something about it, not to just tell the victims to suck it up and just deal with it. Indeed, there is so much research showing the damage that lousy bosses do to productivity, commitment, and well-being that Carol or any other boss who learns of a horrible boss below them in the pecking order owes it to their company to deal with it. The "victims" may be learning more, but those lessons come at a high price that hurts both organization's and people.

The second thing that bugs me is from the victim's perspective, which is that there is so much evidence that bad bosses do damage (recall this Swedish study on heart attacks), that if you care about your physical and mental health -- and those of the people you come in contact with, your friends, lovers, children, and so on -- that you should escape as soon as you possibly can.

Clearly, I don't agree with Bartz about everything, but I admire her enormously because she is so thoughtful and so straightforward, a refreshing voice in a world where too many people are afraid to express strong opinions.

This all raises a great question: What is the most important thing you ever learned NOT TO DO from working for a bad boss?

P.S. One another thing I agree with Bartz about -- in fact a headline of the article -- is that perhaps we ought to get rid of annual performance reviews, as there is good reason to believe that they do more harm than good, as I blogged about here and this Wall Street Journal article by Sam Culbert argues.

UPDATE: I always appreciate the quality and range of comments that readers make, but in this case, they are even better than usual. I suggest that you read them carefully. This post has been up less then a day, so I expect even more good stuff and to change my opinion again over the coming days. But my initial reaction to the comments is that I (and certainly Bartz) should have emphasized the dangers of bad bosses even more, the damage they do to people and as at least one comment implies, the danger that -- just as abusive parents tend to produce abusive children -- the odds are high that bad bosses will teach their followers to be bad bosses like them. Also, by just talking to people who have survived and learned from bad bosses, and become bosses themselves, we blind ourselves to all the able people who have left companies and occupations because they had the sense to leave, were so damaged that they had to leave, or worse yet, became lousy bosses someplace else applying what they learned -- and after doing a lot of damage -- got fired and demoted. Yes, there are examples of the opposite effect, of people who have become great bosses by doing the opposite of past lousy bosses, but the psychological forces of imitation, learning, and identification with authority figures all push people in the opposite direction. Perhaps the best way to learn for bad bosses is to watch and study other people's bad bosses -- that way you get the learning without the damage and risk of imitating their incompetent and nasty ways.

Civilian Friends vs Police Friends: From Captain Nick Gottuso

Bobsutton — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:35:02 -0700

I just got this missive about cops from Captain Nick Gottuso, a Police Department Captain in Hillsborough, California. Nick is also one of the Commanders of a SWAT team composed of about 50 officers from local police departments on the San Francisco Peninsula, and heads up their sniper squad. You can see him above, in full uniform beside the SWAT truck. Nick was the coach on one of my daughter’s soccer teams and I get to know him as I was an assistant coach -- he is a great guy.

Nick is also a great shot. I once asked him why some of the coins on his key chain had bullet holes in the side rather than middle, and wondered if he had missed. He answered that he had put the bullet on the side because it made it easier to get on the key chain. Nick loves his job as much as anyone I know. And you can understand why when he tells about the things he does, like being involved in hostage stand-offs, and the smaller but important things he does every day. For example, he was involved in catching a thief who stole something from one of my colleague’s houses. Because I know Nick, and how much he loves and identifies with his job, I was especially struck by this note he sent around (the origin is unclear, I’d love to give credit to the person who wrote it, so if you know, please chime-in).

Let me know what you think. Here is Nick’s preface: "For those of you who are Cops, you will find this very true. For those of you who aren't... this gives you a little insight as to why we are, the way we are.”

Always a Cop:

Once the badge goes on, it never comes off, whether they can see it, or not. It fuses to the soul through adversity, fear and adrenaline and no one who has ever worn it with pride, integrity and guts, can ever sleep through the 'call of the wild' that wafts through bedroom windows in the deep of the night.

When Cops Retire

When a good cop leaves the 'job' and retires to a better life, many are jealous, some are pleased and yet others, who may have already retired, wonder. We wonder if he knows what he is leaving behind, because we already know. We know, for example, that after a lifetime of camaraderie that few experience, it will remain as a longing for those past times. We know in the law enforcement life there is a fellowship which lasts long after the uniforms are hung up in the back of the closet . We know even if he throws them away, they will be on him with every step and breath that remains in his life. We also know how the very bearing of the man speaks of what he was and in his heart still is.

These are the burdens of the job. You will still look at people suspiciously, still see what others do not see or choose to ignore and always will look at the rest of the law enforcement world with a respect for what they do; only grown in a lifetime of knowing. Never think for one moment you are escaping from that life. You are only escaping the 'job' and merely being allowed to leave 'active' duty.

So what I wish for you is that whenever you ease into retirement, in your heart you never forget for one moment that 'Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called children of God,' and you are still a member of the greatest fraternity the world has ever known.

Civilian Friends vs Police Friends

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Get upset if you're too busy to talk to them for a week.
POLICE FRIENDS: Are glad to see you after years, and will happily carry on the same conversation you were having the last time you met.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Have never seen you cry.
POLICE FRIENDS: Have cried with you..

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Borrow your stuff for a few days then give it back.
POLICE FRIENDS: Keep your stuff so long they forget it's yours.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Know a few things about you..
POLICE FRIENDS: Could write a book with direct quotes from you.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will leave you behind if that's what the crowd is doing.
POLICE FRIENDS: Will kick the crowds' ass that left you behind.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Are for a while.
POLICE FRIENDS: Are for life.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Have shared a few experiences. ..
POLICE FRIENDS: Have shared a lifetime of experiences no citizen could ever dream of...

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will take your drink away when they think you've had enough.
POLICE FRIENDS: Will look at you stumbling all over the place and say, 'You better drink the rest of that before you spill it!!' Then carry you home safely and put you to bed...

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will talk crap to the person who talks crap about you.
POLICE FRIENDS: Will knock them the hell out for using your name in vain.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will ignore this.
POLICE FRIENDS: Will forward this.