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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

CEB’s research shows that customer loyalty has more to do with how well companies keep their “basic, even plain vanilla promises” than with how well they dazzle customers.

fear of taking responsibility, especially the sense that it is safer to do nothing, or something bad, than the right thing.

When someone can find some way to direct a team’s or an organization’s attention toward the people affected by what it does (and away from members’ own needs and wants), they will take greater responsibility for doing the right thing. This was certainly true for those radiologists who detected more errors in X-rays when the patient’s picture was staring back at them. It was also evident when CEO Wright Lassiter at the Alameda Health System convinced union leaders that their patients—and ultimately the workers they represented—would be better off if their members took a shuttle to and from an employee parking lot rather than to compete with patients for parking spots.

«las personas no se marchan de las organizaciones, sino que huyen de los malos jefes».

if someone consistently takes actions that leave a trail of victims in their wake, they deserve to be branded as certified assholes.

Garret Sutton’s books on corporations provide wonderful insight into the power of personal corporations

Robert urges those who own legitimate assets to find out more about corporations’ benefits and protections. Garret Sutton’s books are among many that can help.

Before the pitches began, David reminded people that IDEO’s philosophy was “enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.

In 2013, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and his top team used their powers over all employees of this file-sharing company to cancel hundreds of time-sucking meetings. Employees were wasting so much time in meetings that they kept missing crucial deadlines, especially shipping dates. Drew’s team decided to help Dropbox employees avoid heaping unnecessary meetings on themselves. Dropbox IT folks removed nearly all standing meetings from employees’ calendars and made it impossible for them to add new meetings to their calendars for two weeks. Employees were notified via an email titled “Armeetingeddon has landed.” After explaining why their calendars were “a bit light,” the email asked, “Ahhh, doesn’t it feel fantastic?

Rohm and Haas teaches its leaders that when they face a decision with broad and enduring consequences, taking speedy, narrow, and impulsive action is a recipe for disaster. Instead, Rohm and Haas preaches the Five Voices method. Before making a big decision, leaders slow down, do careful research, and talk to people until they understand five key stakeholders: the customer, the employee, the owner, the community, and the process.

Patty was a Netflix senior executive for the company’s first fourteen years and helped drive its remarkable growth through 2012. Patty believes the company’s long stretch of success was fueled by this “very deliberate” strategy of “making it easy to leave and come back.” Patty notes that, while “pissing off consumers” may have short-term benefits, “a subscription model creates the most profit over the long term—over years, generations.” Eric, who went on to serve as chief algorithm officer at online fashion retailer Stitch Fix, added that companies that make it easy to quit get better data about how to keep customers satisfied and loyal. That’s because the “time to feedback” is faster for the company and the evidence is less noisy because most customers are keeping the service because they want it, not because they are trapped in a roach motel.

Yet, when we dug into the entries on Patrick’s Fast List, we found that many he celebrated were ultimately successful because—at key junctures—friction fixers slowed things way down and did necessary, difficult, and inefficient things. They hit the brakes to prepare for putting the pedal to the metal later, or to clean up problems caused by racing ahead too fast for too long in the past.

Other challenges require people to master the art and science of friction shifting, to transition constantly and instantly between hitting the gas and the brakes. This skill includes moving fast and taking risks one moment, then slowing down, reflecting, and avoiding dangerous mistakes the next.

As Google grew, this practice devolved into a sacred cow that was unnecessary for most job searches, drove away top candidates, and burdened the six, eight, ten, twelve, or fifteen Googlers who interviewed, evaluated, and discussed each candidate. Sometimes it was even worse. Laszlo told us, “People had up to twenty-five [!] interviews before being rejected.” So, he made a simple rule: if more than four interviews were to be conducted with a candidate, a request for an exception had to be approved by him. Most Googlers were hesitant to ask an executive vice president such as Laszlo for an exception, so the gauntlet disappeared for most job candidates. Laszlo added, “It was one of my first lessons in the power of hierarchy to actually do some good.

Jillian and Anita found that heaping a bit of “process friction” on those doctors forced them to pause and think about whether patients’ symptoms indicated they really needed an ultrasound—or if that test would provide little or no useful information. Patients who were spared unnecessary ultrasounds spent less time waiting in a crowded emergency department and avoided the stress and hassle of another test. Eliminating unnecessary ultrasounds also reduced patients’ hospital bills and the workload on hospital radiologists, who are often busy and beleaguered.

Most of us, for example, are victims of the “roach motel” or “one-way-door” problem where it is nearly frictionless to get into a situation, then is mighty hard or impossible to escape.

leave.” Nir proposes the “regret test” for The New York Times, and any other company, whose leaders can bring themselves to squelch their greed and instead want to save users from a visit to the roach motel: “If people knew what it would take to cancel, would they still subscribe?” Friction fixers who take this question seriously can respect customers’ time, avert hypocrisy, and possibly repair their organization’s reputation.

Joe found, rather than thinking of their strategy as distributing sheet music, it’s often better for leaders who want to unleash large-scale change to encourage people to “play jazz,” to adapt to circumstances and try new things “without ever entirely abandoning the original theme.

Joe adds the best change agents are “almost playful” about “finding many ways there.” That means, he says, they look for signs their “sheet music” isn’t working. That it’s time to “play jazz” by experimenting with different messages, tools, people, and partnerships—and to keep tweaking the mix. They resist locking in to a single theory or method. No matter how well things are going right now, they know that “what got us here won’t get us there.

If you are more powerful than your colleagues or customers, you are at risk of being clueless about their friction troubles, and of how you add to their misery.

The first symptom is privilege that spares you from the hassles, humiliations, and barriers heaped on everyone else.