Robert Sutton Quotes

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

As much as I believe in tolerance and fairness, I have never lost a wink of sleep about being unapologetically intolerant of anyone who refuses to show respect for those around them.

If you are a boss, ask yourself: When you look back at how you’ve treated followers, peers, and superiors, in their eyes, will you have earned the right to be proud of yourself? Or will they believe that you ought to be ashamed of yourself and embarrassed by how you have trampled on others’ dignity day after day?

Assholes tend to stick together, and once stuck are not easily separated.

at the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

Listen to those under your supervision. Really listen. Don’t act as if you’re listening and let it go in one ear and out the other. Faking it is worse than not doing it at all.

The University of Michigan’s Karl Weick advises, “Fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong.

Bosses shape how people spend their days and whether they experience joy or despair, perform well or badly, or are healthy or sick. Unfortunately, there are hoards of mediocre and downright rotten bosses out there, and big gaps between the best and the worst.

Fight as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong.

Be slow to label others as assholes, be quick to label yourself as one.

It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.

The best bosses do more than charge up people, and recruit and breed energizers. They eliminate the negative, because even a few bad apples and destructive acts can undermine many good people and constructive acts.

At the places where I want to work, even if people do other things well (even extraordinary well) but routinely demean others, they are seen as incompetent.

Winning is a wonderful thing if you can help and respect others along the way. But if you stomp on others as you climb the ladder and treat them like losers once you reach the top, my opinion is that you debase your own humanity and undermine your team or organization.

Life is too short to put up with assholes.

Bullies drive witnesses and bystanders out of their jobs, just as they do to “firsthand” victims. Research

the impulse to “get even” can provoke a vicious circle of attack and counterattack—where each side views the other as evil and won’t accept responsibility for fueling the conflict, and

two tests that I use for spotting whether a person is acting like an asshole: • Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself? • Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

No one on their death bed wishes they would've been meaner.

It takes numerous encounters with positive people to offset the energy and happiness sapped by a single episode with one asshole.

It means constantly seeking and implementing better ways of thinking and acting across old and new corners of the system.

People also have a greater capacity when they aren’t worn down by work and worry. When people get enough sleep, they are more adept at difficult tasks, are more interpersonally sensitive, make better decisions, and are less likely to turn nasty.

Everyone deserves to be treated fairly. If leaders are the problem, we ask those being served by leaders to let them know or go up the chain of command—without the threat of retaliation.” “Store

A huge body of research—hundreds of studies—shows that when people are put in positions of power, they start talking more, taking what they want for themselves, ignoring what other people say or want, ignoring how less powerful people react to their behavior, acting more rudely, and generally treating any situation or person as a means for satisfying their own needs—and that being put in positions of power blinds them to the fact that they are acting like jerks.

Support a few crackpots, heretics, and dreamers, especially if they are wildly optimistic about their ideas.

My job is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn’t hit you. Your job is to keep me from having to use it.

The best management is sometimes less management or no management at all. William Coyne, who led 3M’s Research and Development efforts for over a decade, believed a big part of his job was to leave his people alone and protect them from other curious executives. As he put it: ‘After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing.

Psychological safety is the key to creating a workplace where people can be confident enough to act without undue fear of being ridiculed, punished, or fired – and be humble enough to openly doubt what is believed and done. As Amy Edmondson’s research shows, psychological safety emerges when those in power persistently praise, reward, and promote people who have the courage to act, talk about their doubts, successes, and failures, and work doggedly to do things better the next time.

Hundreds of experiments show that encounters with rude, insulting, and demeaning people undermine others’ performance—including their decision-making skills, productivity, creativity, and willingness to work a little harder and stay a little later to finish projects and to help coworkers who need their advice, skills, or emotional support.

Third, and finally, if you want people to believe the system is fair and effective, it’s essential to be tough on the most powerful, profitable, and well-known jerks. If you enforce the rule only with the weak performers, people who are easily replaceable, or who deliver bad news and have the gumption to disagree with superiors—and you allow powerful assholes to run roughshod over anyone they please—people will smell your hypocritical bullshit from a mile away.

He was afflicted with what I call “Asshole Blindness,” where people don’t realize or underestimate how dire an asshole problem is, how much they and perhaps others are suffering, and how important it is to get out as soon as possible.

as the research shows, the more time you spend around rotten apples – those lousy, lazy, grumpy, and nasty people – the more damage you will suffer. When people are emotionally depleted, they stop focusing on their jobs and instead work on improving their moods. If you find that there are a few subordinates who are so unpleasant that, day after day, they sap the energy you need to inspire others and feel good about your own job, my advice – if you can’t get rid of them – is to spend as little time around them as possible.

weird ideas spark innovation because each helps companies do at least one of three things: (1) increase variance in available knowledge, (2) see old things in new ways, and (3) break from the past. These are the three basic organizing principles for innovative work,

A hallmark of petty tyrants—including many Rule Nazis—is that their power over a narrow domain is coupled with low prestige; they simmer and sulk about the lack of respect they get. This mix of power and low social status creates a deadly brew—it provokes them to take out their frustration and resentment on others.

In a New York Times article, Stanford professor Robert Sutton commented, “One nasty person can bring down a whole group. That can happen because the group members devote more energy to dealing with the bad apple and less energy to the task at hand. Moreover, anger and hostility are contagious, so the whole group can become infected.

Negative interactions (and the bad apples who provoke them) pack such a wallop in close relationships because they are so distracting, emotionally draining, and deflating. When a group does interdependent work, rotten apples drag down and infect everyone else. Unfortunately, grumpiness, nastiness, laziness, and stupidity are remarkably contagious.

Make sure that slow learners are rewarded—or at least not punished— for expressing their deviant views and acting in odd ways.

Organizations that learn from their failures forgive and remember, they don’t forgive and forget.

talented employees who put their needs ahead of their colleagues and the company are dangerous.

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”23

Galileo was jailed for asserting that the earth was round.5

As Max DePree, former CEO of furniture maker Herman Miller, put it, “The first job of a leader is to define reality.

Harry S. Truman said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

Hatfield and her colleagues sum up emotional contagion research with an Arabic proverb: “A wise man associating with the vicious becomes an idiot.

Unfortunately, Captain Graf created fear and mistrust in her followers, rather than stoking the courage, skill, and confidence she intended.

Then there are people with modest but real power—and who take sick satisfaction from frustrating and pushing others around.

In other words, that American asshole rattled the Israeli health-care professionals so much that it undermined their ability to treat sick babies.

people “who don’t have a chance to take revenge are forced, in a sense, to move on and focus on something different.

When employees have negative interactions with supervisors, for example, it has five times more impact on their moods than positive interactions.

That “telling them where they stand, while giving them the chance to try a new environment, is often enough to get them to change their behavior.

Assholes are like cockroaches. If you shine a light on them, they run for cover. At our workplace, we’re starting to insist on more transparency, less backroom chatter, and an end to the secrecy that allows our resident asshole to carry on his antics. We share information with each other, refuse to let him trap us into private discussions of our coworkers, and generally don’t give him permission to manipulate us. It’s driving him nuts! He’s run out of allies (who were never very willing to begin with), and he doesn’t know what to do next.

In Katy’s language, this chapter is about—when you can’t or won’t avert engaging with crazy completely—how to limit the frequency, duration, and intensity of the abuse you face and feel.

Perry “puts all the bad apples in one barrel” so they don’t wreck other teams. He then assigns a no-nonsense coach to lead the bad apples or does it himself—he is adept at dispensing tough love.

The first diagnostic question follows from the late writer Maya Angelou’s assertion that “at the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

A series of controlled experiments and field studies in organizations shows that when teams engage in conflict over ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect, they develop better ideas and perform better .

Bill Lazier’s advice means that you ought to do your homework before taking a job. Find out if you are about to enter a den of assholes, and if you are, don’t give in to the temptation to join them in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci said, “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end,” which is sound social psychology. The more time and effort that people put into anything—no matter how useless, dysfunctional, or downright stupid it might be—the harder it is for them to walk away, be it a bad investment, a destructive relationship, an exploitive job, or a workplace filled with browbeaters, bullies, and bastards.

As we’ve seen, such jerks don’t need to hold prestigious positions—they just need to be adept at recruiting allies to help them backstab, intimidate, and spread vicious lies about anybody who stands in their way.

The implication is that if you want to quell your inner jerk and avoid spreading (and catching) this form of asshole poisoning, use ideas and language that frame life in ways that will make you focus on cooperation.

Michael told me that he designs the “how” part of his actions “with the other person’s point of view in mind.” Even when breaking off with an asshole, he works to “convey the truth in respectful and empathetic ways.

Good bosses focus their attention, and their people’s efforts, on the small number of things that matter most. The best bosses learn when they can and should ignore the least important demands from others. But some demands can’t be avoided even though they have little, if any, impact on people or performance. In such cases, it might be wise to do a quick and crummy job so you can ‘check the box’ and quickly move on to more crucial chores.

A 2012 study documented how such shit rolled downhill: abusive senior leaders were prone to selecting or breeding abusive team leaders, who in turn, ignited destructive conflict in their teams, which stifled team members’ creativity.

Wise people “have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.

A Lutheran pastor in Illinois writes: A great deal of the work in our church is done by non-paid individuals who, at times, hurt the feelings of fellow volunteers. Do you have any thoughts on what to do with mean people who volunteer their time?

The protective powers of such “upward hostility” seem striking: abused employees who fought back harder were less prone to see themselves as victims, more satisfied with their jobs and careers, less distressed, and more committed to their organizations.

and supply-chain experts, and get more space. Corey also knew that little things can mean a lot, and as a boss, you can earn credibility with your people by demonstrating that you will go to war for them every now and then—even over fairly trivial things.

When your boss listens to you carefully, reaches out to help you, and learns from you, it enhances your dignity and pride. Doing so also helps your boss gain empathy for you, to better understand how it feels to be you and what you need to succeed in your job and life.

The rule isn’t just for teams and organizations. It is a personal commitment that shapes how you judge people, the kind of individuals you hang out with and work with, and your determination to detect, dampen, and defeat disrespectful actions made by yourself and others.

But an occasional strategic outburst seems to be effective because “targets” construe their temporary tormentor as trying to motivate them to try harder and to be smarter—they don’t dismiss it as just the usual ranting from a certified asshole who berates them constantly

Forgiveness is also important because, as a study of surgical errors found, “when a subordinate sees his technical errors are forgiven, he recognizes there is no incentive to hide them. He is less likely, therefore, to compound his problems by attempting to treat problems that are over his head for fear of superordinate reprisal.

As this sales representative discovered, when individuals dress up as organizations, sometimes they twist, exaggerate, or even defy the letter or spirit of the real rules, and will try to belittle, dismiss, frustrate, or ignore you, because they are insecure, lazy, on a power trip, or plagued by other personal quirks. But once you out them, their house of cards just might collapse.

But if you want to make a place safe for people to take on culprits, and admit their own bad behaviors too, it’s crucial to treat alleged jerks with dignity and respect. That means starting with calm and backstage conversations with them and giving them chances to change. It also means realizing that some people aren’t usually jerks, but there is something about the characters they work with, their customers,

a twenty-year study that tracked six thousand British civil servants found that when their bosses criticized them unfairly, didn’t listen to their problems, and rarely praised them, employees suffered more angina, heart attacks, and deaths from heart disease. You get the idea. It doesn’t matter whether the assholes around you are getting ahead or (more likely) screwing up their lives, careers, and companies. They pose a danger to you and others.

Psychologist Susan Fiske observes, ‘Attention is directed up the hierarchy. Secretaries know more about their bosses than vice versa; graduate students know more about their advisors than vice versa.’ Fiske explains this happens because, like our fellow primates, ‘people pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power.

Interruptions are especially destructive to people who need to concentrate – knowledge workers like hardware engineers, graphic designers, lawyers, writers, architects, accountants, and so on. Research by Gloria Mark and her colleagues shows that it takes people an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from an interruption and return to the task they had been working on – which happens because interruptions destroy their train of thought and divert attention to other tasks. A related study shows that although employees who experience interruptions compensate by working faster when they return to what they were doing, this speed comes at a cost, including feeling frustrated, stressed, and harried. Some interruptions are unavoidable and are part of the work – but as a boss, the more trivial and unnecessary intrusions you can absorb, the more work your people will do and the less their mental health will suffer.

The best bosses find the sweet spot between acting like spineless wimps who always do just as they are told (no matter how absurd) versus insubordinate rabble-rousers who challenge and ignore every order and standard operating procedure. Good bosses try to cooperate with superiors and do what is best for their organizations, but they realize that defiance can be required to protect their people and themselves – and sometimes is even ultimately appreciated by superiors.

THE 11 COMMANDMENTS FOR WISE BOSSES Have strong opinions and weakly held beliefs. Do not treat others as if they are idiots. Listen attentively to your people; don’t just pretend to hear what they say. Ask a lot of good questions. Ask others for help and gratefully accept their assistance. Do not hesitate to say, ‘I don’t know’. Forgive people when they fail, remember the lessons, and teach them to everyone. Fight as if you are right, and listen as if you are wrong. Do not hold grudges after losing an argument. Instead, help the victors implement their ideas with all your might. Know your foibles and flaws, and work with people who correct and compensate for your weaknesses. Express gratitude to your people.

Numerous lawyers, consultants, and accountants have told me that when a client has treated them badly, they avoid working for them again unless they are desperate, and when they must, they often charge higher rates to make themselves feel better and because assholes consume extra time and emotional energy. A European consultant explained his firm’s evidence-based ‘asshole pricing’ in a comment on my blog: We’ve therefore abandoned the old pricing altogether and simply have a list of difficult customers who get charged more. Before The No Asshole Rule became widely known, we were calling this Asshole Pricing. It isn’t just a tax, a surcharge on the regular price; the entirety of the price quoted is driven by Asshole considerations.

THE 12 COMMANDMENTS OF BOSSES’ DIRTY WORK How to Implement Tough Decisions in Effective and Humane Ways Do not delay painful decisions and actions; hoping the problem will go away or that someone else will do your dirty work rarely is an effective path. Assume that you are clueless, or at least have only a dim understanding, of how people judge you and the dirty work that you do. Implement tough decisions as well as you can – even if they strike you as wrong or misguided. Or get out of the way and let someone else do it. Do everything possible to communicate to all who will be affected how distressing events will unfold, so they can predict when bad things will (and will not) happen to them. Explain early and often why the dirty work is necessary. Look for ways to give employees influence over how painful changes happen to them, even when it is impossible to change what will happen to them. Never humiliate, belittle, or bad-mouth people who are the targets of your dirty work. Ask yourself and fellow bosses to seriously consider if the dirty work is really necessary before implementing it. Just because all your competitors do it, or you have always done it in the past, does not mean it is wise right now. Do not bullshit or lie to employees, as doing so can destroy their loyalty and confidence, along with your reputation. Keep your big mouth shut. Divulging sensitive or confidential information can harm employees, your organization, and you, too. Refrain from doing mean-spirited things to exact personal revenge against employees who resist or object to your dirty work. Do not attempt dirty work if you lack the power to do it right, no matter how necessary it may seem.

The worst bosses condemn their people to live in constant fear as they wait for the next wave of bad news, which always seems to hit without warning and at random intervals. The best bosses do everything possible to communicate when and how distressing events will unfold. When the timing of a stressful event can be predicted, so can its absence: Psychologist Martin Seligman called this the safety signal hypothesis. Predictability helps people know when to relax versus when dread and vigilance are warranted – which protects them from the emotional and physical exhaustion that results when people never feel safe from harm for even a moment. Seligman illustrated his hypothesis with air-raid sirens used during the German bombing of London during World War II. The sirens were so reliable that people went about their lives most of the time without fear; they didn’t need to worry about dashing to the shelters unless the sirens sounded.

organizations that spread and sustain excellence are infused with a “relentless restlessness”—that often uncomfortable urge for constant innovation, driven by the nagging feeling that things are never quite good enough.

When people (regardless of personality) wield power, their ability to lord it over others causes them to (1) become more focused on their own needs and wants; (2) become less focused on others’ needs, wants, and actions; and (3) act as if written and unwritten rules others are expected to follow don’t apply to them

Cheer up!" said Mr. Sutton when he'd read the letter. "Kathy Alice may come to see you!" All the children groaned. "Earnestine wants to meet your Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Ross and Kathy Alice here on Thanksgiving Day." "Tell her we won't be home," said Ellen. "Where will we be?" asked Dewey. "Anywhere except here," said Ellen, "if they're coming to see us.

Bosses of the most productive work groups confronted problems directly and quickly...And quickly move on to more crucial chores.

The truth is that bosses...don't matter as much as most of us believe. They typically account for less than 15 percent of the gap between good and bad organizational performance, although they often get over 50 percent of the blame and credit.

[T]he best bosses master the fine art of emotional detachment. They learn to forgive people who lash out at them... and they learn to forgive themselves, too.

Be repetitive and concrete. The things you say over and over have the most impact if they specify what to do and when to do it.

[D]oing management work requires dozens -sometimes hundreds - of brief and fragmented tasks each day.

Great bosses avoid burdening their people. They invent, borrow, and implement ways to reduce the mental and emotional load they heap on followers.

The best bosses break down problems into bite-sized pieces and talk and act like each little task is something that people can complete without great difficulty.

Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton described this phenomenon in his now famous book The No Asshole Rule. He defines an asshole as someone who makes other people feel worse about themselves or who specifically targets people less powerful than him or her.

As Robert Kiyosaki learned during his study of admiralty law, corporations came into common usage in the 1500s to protect investors in maritime ventures. Prior to the popular use of corporations, investors would come together as a partnership, outfit a ship, and send it out for trading purposes. If the ship was lost at sea, the investors could not only lose everything but also be personally sued by various creditors. Of course, this exposure deterred people from risk taking and discouraged economic activity. Seeing this, the English Crown and courts allowed for the charter of corporations whereby risks and liabilities could be limited to the corporation itself. The shareholders, the investors in the corporation, were liable only to the extent of their contribution to the business. This was a significant development in world economic history.

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

he is simply heads and tails more capable than anyone else. It’s a romantic notion in popular media—Sherlock Holmes, Miranda Priestly, Tony Stark—but in real life, these people are not who you want on your team no matter how talented they are. Instead of a multiplier effect, you get a divider effect: the presence of this person makes the rest of your team less effective. Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton described this phenomenon in his now famous book The No Asshole Rule. He defines an asshole as someone who makes other people feel worse about themselves or who specifically targets people less powerful than him or

We’d been enticed (or perhaps duped) by what Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton and his colleagues call the “the IKEA effect,” which happens because “labor leads to love.” The upshot of their studies—building on research on cognitive dissonance that goes back to the 1950s—is that the harder we work at something, the more we will cherish it, independently of its other qualities. This happens because we humans are driven to justify our efforts to ourselves and others. We think and say, “That sure was a lot of work, but it was worth it,” whether or not it is true!

The bigger lesson for The Friction Project is that making snap judgments about what ought to be hard and what ought to be easy is risky business. Savvy trustees hit the pause button and figure out what to make easy, hard, or impossible before they turn to how to do it. They strive to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible but keep searching for signs that it will take longer to go fast and cost more money to do things cheaply.

Research on launching new businesses and products shows that—at best—the so-called first-mover advantage is a dangerous half-truth. When markets are treacherous and uncertainty is high, first movers often flounder because consumers aren’t ready for their ideas or are put off by crummy early offerings. Companies that launch their products or services later end up as winners, in part, because they learn from the fatal missteps of eager early movers. Amazon was not the first online bookstore; the defunct Books.com and Interloc were among the earlier entrants. Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser, was launched years before Google. Myspace was a successful social networking service before Facebook. Couchsurfing was founded before Airbnb. Being first is risky when smart fast followers can learn from your troubles and pass you

This logic also explains why creative work is and ought to be hard, frustrating, and sometimes exhausting. Skilled creators find ways to be somewhat less inefficient, for example, by generating ideas faster, testing promising ideas rather than endlessly arguing about them, and killing bad ideas fast. But piles of academic studies confirm there is no quick and easy path to creativity. Psychologist Teresa Amabile has studied creativity for more than forty years. She says, if you want to kill creativity, insist that people standardize their work methods, spend as little time as possible on every task, have as few failures as possible, and explain and justify how they spend every minute and dollar. Imaginative people, because they live in a cognitive minefield, do poor work when they are forced to be fast and efficient and to avoid mistakes. If they aren’t constantly struggling, feeling confused, failing, and arguing, and trying, modifying, and rejecting new ideas, they are doing it wrong.

A purge happens when powerful leaders spearhead a deep and focused effort to remove broken parts of an organization. Purges were part of the renowned turnarounds by Lou Gerstner when he led IBM from 1993 to 2002 and by Steve Jobs when he returned to lead Apple in 1997.

IBM’s marketing train wreck and Apple’s bewildering product lineup were fueled by a similar cause: decentralized businesses each had enough power to add stuff, but not enough to stop others from doing so, too. This is a twist on Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. Each business had incentives for adding yet another campaign or product, but each addition hurt IBM and Apple by confusing customers and wasting money. Although management gurus often bad-mouth leaders who exercise “command and control,” as Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs did, sometimes that’s just what a broken organization needs.

Pushkala’s team knew that top-down approaches like those used by Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs would backfire in this company as, unlike IBM and Apple, AstraZeneca wasn’t in crisis—although revenue and profits fell between 2011 and 2016. AstraZeneca is also a decentralized company, in which local leaders have substantial authority to accept, modify, or ignore orders from on high. So, rather than telling people what to do, Pushkala’s team took “a player-coach” approach. They implemented some key companywide efforts, but believed their success hinged on the cumulative impact of small systemwide and local changes. Most employees would join the effort because they wanted to, not because they had to. And the team believed that many of the best solutions would be tailored for tackling distinct local problems. As Pushkala put it, “Let us not solve world hunger; let us start eating the elephant in small chunks.