Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / "Zero Friction": AI Bosses & the Decline of the Assh*le w/ VERY SPECIAL GUEST Bob Sutton

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"Zero Friction": AI Bosses & the Decline of the Assh*le w/ VERY SPECIAL GUEST Bob Sutton · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:02
Speaker 1: Hey, IT Changemakers, and welcome to The Dex Show with
0:06
Speaker 1: Tom McGraw.
0:06
Speaker 2: Let's get into it.
0:10
Speaker 3: Hello, Changemakers. Listen, we love making, producing, hosting The Dex
0:16
Speaker 3: Show here on The Dex Show. It's a privilege. It's
0:19
Speaker 3: a pleasure. And as much as we love to talk Dex,
0:22
Speaker 3: we also relish the opportunity to go a little bit
0:26
Speaker 3: outside of our usual comfort zone the workplace more generally.
0:33
Speaker 3: And I have to say, in the five plus years
0:36
Speaker 3: we've been doing this show, I've rarely been as excited
0:39
Speaker 3: to welcome a guest as I am today. His name
0:43
Speaker 3: is Bob Sutton. He's an organizational psychologist, Stanford professor, author
0:48
Speaker 3: of several influential books, including one of my favorites on
0:52
Speaker 3: workplace psychology, which is The No Asshole Rule. Absolutely legendary book.
0:57
Speaker 3: And it's just a great, great pleasure. I'm so excited
1:00
Speaker 3: to welcome him to the show. Bob, how are you?
1:02
Speaker 3: Nice to see you. Welcome to the deck show.
1:04
Speaker 2: Great to meet you, Tom. And yeah, I'm excited to
1:07
Speaker 2: be here. Yeah.
1:09
Speaker 3: So many, so many questions. You've got to forgive me
1:11
Speaker 3: because I read the No Asshole Rule years ago. Absolutely
1:15
Speaker 3: loved it. And I've got to ask you a couple
1:18
Speaker 3: of questions about it before we get started. I was always,
1:21
Speaker 3: you may feature it, but as I was planning, I thought, well,
1:24
Speaker 3: What got you so interested in workplace leadership in particular?
1:27
Speaker 3: Were there specific instances of toxic leadership, the toxic workplace
1:33
Speaker 3: that kind of triggered your academic curiosity in that direction?
1:36
Speaker 2: Well, I would say there were two things. Going way
1:40
Speaker 2: back when I was in high school, 16, 17, 18,
1:43
Speaker 2: I had an experience of starting out at a local
1:47
Speaker 2: pizza parlor, which is just a mile and a half
1:49
Speaker 2: from the Stanford campus, by the way, a mile. And
1:53
Speaker 2: I started out delivering pizzas and I worked my way
1:55
Speaker 2: up to night manager. So I went through that arc
2:00
Speaker 2: and I had at least one asshole boss in that
2:02
Speaker 2: in the process. And so I went from the arc
2:05
Speaker 2: of being like, you know, the bottom of the totem
2:07
Speaker 2: pole to sort of the upper middle level management. And
2:11
Speaker 2: there was there was a guy who owned the place
2:13
Speaker 2: in particular was pretty who's pretty much of an asshole.
2:15
Speaker 2: So I learned about that. And my father always complained
2:18
Speaker 2: about the assholes he worked with. But maybe the thing
2:22
Speaker 2: that most precipitated the no asshole rule, which is really
2:26
Speaker 2: about how to build a relatively asshole-free workplace, was at
2:30
Speaker 2: the time I wrote the book, my wife Marina was
2:32
Speaker 2: managing partner, so essentially COO of a law firm that
2:36
Speaker 2: had about 1,000 lawyers. And when you lead a big
2:42
Speaker 2: law firm, as she would put it, asshole management is
2:45
Speaker 2: a big part of the job. because you've got lawyers.
2:52
Speaker 2: You basically hire, especially in litigation, you hire a lawyer
2:56
Speaker 2: to be your asshole. The person who advocates for you.
3:00
Speaker 2: This isn't in the book. One day she comes home
3:02
Speaker 2: from work and she says, I think the key to
3:05
Speaker 2: law firm management is knowing how to turn your assholes
3:08
Speaker 2: on and off. Anyways, I think that might have been
3:13
Speaker 2: the event. The other thing is I was writing A
3:16
Speaker 2: very long book with a guy named Jeff Pfeffer on
3:19
Speaker 2: evidence-based management called Hard Facts. And I needed a little
3:24
Speaker 2: bit of comic entertainment. And I thought this was just
3:26
Speaker 2: going to be a side project to keep me going
3:28
Speaker 2: in the big project. And of course, it sold more
3:31
Speaker 2: than all my books combined. So there's a bit to
3:34
Speaker 2: that story. And I've also probably been overly sensitive to
3:37
Speaker 2: asshole bosses in my life, too.
3:40
Speaker 3: Do you think you're a sensitive person, Bob? Like if
3:42
Speaker 3: somebody's mean to you, does it, does it rankle and
3:44
Speaker 3: infuriate you? Are you quite good at.
3:47
Speaker 2: You know, I'm probably not very good at emotional control.
3:50
Speaker 2: That's probably why I'm actually, uh, I'm not that great
3:53
Speaker 2: in organizational politician. You know, the, the great organizational politicians
3:56
Speaker 2: know how to sort of turn it on and off. Um,
3:59
Speaker 2: but yeah, I, I probably am overly thin skin. That
4:02
Speaker 2: might be part of it too.
4:04
Speaker 3: You, you by and large can be, especially when you're
4:06
Speaker 3: writing a book, you know, as a, you.
4:09
Speaker 2: I guess that's true. The other part that I think
4:14
Speaker 2: is also worth talking about is that in a certain ways,
4:18
Speaker 2: assholes are incredibly entertaining. The other story, which is in
4:24
Speaker 2: the last chapter of the book, is that 45 years ago,
4:30
Speaker 2: there's a little Italian restaurant called Little Joe's in San Francisco,
4:33
Speaker 2: and And their motto was rain or shine, there's always
4:37
Speaker 2: a line at Little Joe's. And there'd be this long
4:39
Speaker 2: counter and you'd wait in line. The main reason their
4:42
Speaker 2: food was perfectly good is there's this long counter, there's
4:43
Speaker 2: this very entertaining chef. So he'd watch the chef and
4:47
Speaker 2: he'd banter and everything. And there was a jerk who
4:51
Speaker 2: was sitting in his chair and he was yelling at
4:53
Speaker 2: the chef. He was berating everyone. He was really being nasty.
4:58
Speaker 2: And so this guy walks up to him, just a stranger,
5:02
Speaker 2: and says, what's your name? You're You're just perfect. You're
5:04
Speaker 2: one of the most amazing people I've ever met in
5:06
Speaker 2: my life. You're fantastic. And the guy, he kind of
5:10
Speaker 2: looks up and he realized, oh, I'm being appreciated. And
5:13
Speaker 2: he gives him his name and he said, thank you.
5:15
Speaker 2: He said, I'm writing a book on assholes and you're
5:17
Speaker 2: perfect for chapter seven. And so I actually maybe got
5:21
Speaker 2: the idea of a book on assholes when I was
5:24
Speaker 2: waiting in line. And it was just one of the
5:26
Speaker 2: most brilliant public put-downs I've ever seen in my life.
5:29
Speaker 2: It was just.
5:30
Speaker 3: That's amazing. I'm writing a book on assholes and you
5:33
Speaker 3: thought I should write a book on assholes.
5:35
Speaker 2: That's somewhere in the last chapter.
5:37
Speaker 3: All right. One last kind of specific kickback question, man,
5:41
Speaker 3: just because I was wondering about what makes an asshole, Bob?
5:47
Speaker 3: In your eyes or it could be in somebody's life experiences,
5:51
Speaker 3: like what? Or like in our view, or both, I
5:54
Speaker 3: don't know.
5:55
Speaker 2: Well, so I guess we'll get academic and specific here, right? Okay, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
6:01
Speaker 2: So there's actually a large academic body of research on
6:04
Speaker 2: abusive supervision, workplace bullying, and so forth. And I would
6:08
Speaker 2: say that there's two different approaches. One approach is to
6:13
Speaker 2: just list the behavior that nasty people would use to others.
6:19
Speaker 2: You know, the.
6:21
Speaker 2: The nastiness they would inflict on others. And this is
6:23
Speaker 2: everything from ignoring them, glaring at them, yelling at them,
6:26
Speaker 2: to hitting them. In my book, I have the dirty dozen,
6:30
Speaker 2: glaring at people, yelling at them, things like that. So
6:33
Speaker 2: that's the behavioral part about it. The problem with the
6:37
Speaker 2: behavioral part is it's very context and culturally complicated. So,
6:43
Speaker 2: I mean, just for example, let's compare the Israeli culture
6:46
Speaker 2: to the Japanese culture. I have friends who've worked in
6:49
Speaker 2: both Israel and Japan. And yelling at somebody in Israel is,
6:53
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, it's perfectly normal. I've had a number of
6:56
Speaker 2: Israeli co-authors, and they just yell at each other all
6:58
Speaker 2: the time. We yell at each other. In Japan, you
7:01
Speaker 2: don't do that. By the way, in the UK either.
7:04
Speaker 2: Like yelling in the UK is a different meaning than
7:06
Speaker 2: in Israel.
7:07
Speaker 3: We certainly don't.
7:10
Speaker 2: You're kind of like Californians. You're like passive-aggressive with accents, though.
7:14
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
7:16
Speaker 2: But there's another perspective. which is the perspective I use
7:20
Speaker 2: more in the book, which I'm not sure it's scientifically better,
7:22
Speaker 2: but it's better for selling books. And that's, you would
7:27
Speaker 2: tend to label, or I would tend to label somebody
7:29
Speaker 2: an asshole when they leave me feeling demeaned, disrespected, and
7:33
Speaker 2: so forth. So somebody who makes me feel like dirt,
7:35
Speaker 2: somebody who makes me feel like shit. And so, and
7:39
Speaker 2: there's problems with both of those definitions. The problem with
7:43
Speaker 2: my definition, and I try to offset it, is that
7:46
Speaker 2: there's a lot of evidence that we as humans, since
7:49
Speaker 2: we have self-serving attributions, we tend to be very fast
7:53
Speaker 2: to label others as assholes. I probably do that. And
7:57
Speaker 2: very slow to label ourselves. So one of my, I
8:00
Speaker 2: don't know if it works, but one of my de-biasing
8:03
Speaker 2: advices is be slow to label other people as assholes
8:08
Speaker 2: and fast to label yourself. And then there's a key
8:11
Speaker 2: distinction we should talk about which is the distinction between
8:14
Speaker 2: certified assholes and temporary assholes. So a certified asshole is somebody,
8:20
Speaker 2: not to give an example, but I think the president
8:22
Speaker 2: of my country would qualify, is somebody who is consistently
8:26
Speaker 2: nasty to people across time and places. And a temporary
8:31
Speaker 2: asshole is just, you know, and my argument is that
8:34
Speaker 2: all of us under the wrong conditions, and I could
8:36
Speaker 2: show you the experiments, Uh, we can, we can become
8:39
Speaker 2: demeaning and nasty. Um, maybe there's somebody who's so kind
8:43
Speaker 2: and emotional control, maybe the Pope or something. I don't know. Um, who,
8:46
Speaker 2: who could always control themselves and not do it. Dolly,
8:49
Speaker 2: the late Dolly Parton perhaps. Um, and, um, but, uh, but, uh,
8:54
Speaker 2: psychologists are brilliant at taking perfectly normal people and turning
8:59
Speaker 2: them into jerks and get sleep deprivation works, um, putting
9:04
Speaker 2: people in a hurry works, uh, Being around a bunch
9:07
Speaker 2: of assholes is one of them. It's a very contagious disease.
9:11
Speaker 2: So anyway, so there's lots of ways to turn people
9:14
Speaker 2: into jerks. Insulting them, demeaning them. Calling people an asshole
9:17
Speaker 2: is a pretty good way to turn people into assholes.
9:19
Speaker 3: That's pretty good, yeah. You must be the biggest asshole then, Bob.
9:25
Speaker 3: You would spread him out everywhere. Do you don't think
9:29
Speaker 3: like insecurity is like a key? Like insecurity is where somebody.
9:37
Speaker 3: Putting aside the temporary asshole which we can all be
9:40
Speaker 3: as you say tiredness frustration etc notwithstanding insecurity is that
9:45
Speaker 3: like fountain yeah persistent belittlement yeah.
9:48
Speaker 2: Yeah i i i think i think insecurity and then
9:51
Speaker 2: people who triggers are insecurity and i think as i
9:53
Speaker 2: say we're all capable of it and uh you know
9:55
Speaker 2: that's what one of my other mottos is assholes are
9:57
Speaker 2: us and so so uh it, it is sort of
10:01
Speaker 2: a difficult thing to do. And in the, in the book,
10:03
Speaker 2: and it's also online, we have a self-test called the
10:07
Speaker 2: asshole rating self-exam.
10:08
Speaker 3: It's actually not called.
10:10
Speaker 2: That in the book, but it's like, it's 22 questions
10:12
Speaker 2: and it's, it's kind of a tongue in cheek in, in,
10:15
Speaker 2: in joking. And, and the other, uh, and, and so here,
10:19
Speaker 2: let's see, I think I've got the book here. So
10:21
Speaker 2: here's an example of the arse. Here we are. Let's see.
10:28
Speaker 2: So it's a checklist. You feel surrounded by incompetent idiots
10:32
Speaker 2: and you can't help letting them know the truth every
10:34
Speaker 2: now and then. It's like questions like that. And back
10:37
Speaker 2: to my wife. So this is online as the arse.
10:41
Speaker 2: Guy Kawasaki renamed it the arse and put it online.
10:44
Speaker 2: So when I was working on the book, my editor,
10:47
Speaker 2: the late Rick Wolf, great guy. So he writes me,
10:51
Speaker 2: he said, this book needs a quiz. And I said,
10:52
Speaker 2: I'm really bad at writing quiz. So this is, remember,
10:54
Speaker 2: my wife is running a law firm that has got
10:56
Speaker 2: like a thousand lawyers.
10:58
Speaker 3: I'm a front line of asshole central. Sorry to any
11:02
Speaker 3: legal professional listeners.
11:04
Speaker 2: So I send her an email. It usually doesn't even
11:07
Speaker 2: read my books, let alone help me write them. And
11:09
Speaker 2: I said, Marina, so I need a quiz. You got
11:12
Speaker 2: any ideas? So like 20 minutes later, like this thing,
11:17
Speaker 2: as it stands right now, she just sends back the list.
11:20
Speaker 2: I don't know, you see your coworkers as competitors. You
11:22
Speaker 2: don't trust the people around you and they don't trust you.
11:25
Speaker 2: And she just thought of every nasty partner she wrote
11:28
Speaker 2: with and she just sent me the list and that
11:29
Speaker 2: was the arse test. I think, honestly, in 20 minutes,
11:32
Speaker 2: she just cranked it out. And I think, I don't know,
11:36
Speaker 2: more than half a million people have completed the asshole rating.
11:39
Speaker 3: True inspiration. I have interviewed people who work at law
11:46
Speaker 3: firms in IT companies specifically for this show and others.
11:52
Speaker 3: They carry some scars, you know, I don't mind.
11:54
Speaker 2: Oh, oh. And just to be clear that assholes aren't,
12:02
Speaker 2: lawyers aren't the only people who are assholes. If I
12:04
Speaker 2: would pick a group where I've seen the most tension
12:07
Speaker 2: in the organizations that I've worked in, including some of
12:09
Speaker 2: my old early research, if you look at the tension
12:13
Speaker 2: between doctors and nurses, especially surgeons. Mm-hmm. Because surgeons, very
12:20
Speaker 2: sort of macho, especially you got sort of like male
12:24
Speaker 2: heart surgeons and sort of the female nurses, you have
12:28
Speaker 2: all these different things. And by the way, that had
12:32
Speaker 2: an effect on my life since I saw a lot
12:34
Speaker 2: of this, of this sort of abuse. There's a bunch
12:36
Speaker 2: of research, including by the famous Amy Edmondson, that when
12:41
Speaker 2: nurses feel intimidated or lack of psychological safety by the surgeons,
12:46
Speaker 2: and by the way, her husband is Dean of the
12:48
Speaker 2: Harvard medical schools, you know, something about, um, about, uh,
12:51
Speaker 2: surgeons and stuff. They're afraid to call out mistakes. And,
12:56
Speaker 2: and so when I needed heart surgery about 15 years ago, I,
13:00
Speaker 2: I went to a place called the Cleveland clinic, which
13:02
Speaker 2: is 2000 miles from my house. I would note that, uh,
13:05
Speaker 2: there's a world famous surgical center at one mile from
13:07
Speaker 2: my house in the Stanford university. And, uh, at that time,
13:11
Speaker 2: I think it's better. The surgeons I met at, um,
13:14
Speaker 2: at the Stanford hospital were assholes. They really, and I
13:17
Speaker 2: had a lot of evidence cause I have a lot
13:18
Speaker 2: of gossip. And, and so I went to the Cleveland clinic,
13:21
Speaker 2: which also has better surgical outcomes, uh, under the U
13:25
Speaker 2: S healthcare system. What I had, the insurance was the same.
13:27
Speaker 2: It was just their travel costs. And the, the, the
13:30
Speaker 2: then CEO of the Cleveland clinic told me, if you're
13:32
Speaker 2: an asshole surgeon, we fire them here. And he'd been
13:36
Speaker 2: head of all the, he'd been head of all the
13:38
Speaker 2: heart surgeons before he ran the whole Cleveland clinic. And so, uh,
13:42
Speaker 2: And I had a very nice surgeon, Mark Gillinoff, who
13:46
Speaker 2: did my surgery, just beloved, also a skilled surgeon.
13:50
Speaker 3: Well, you know, if you're going into like heart surgery
13:53
Speaker 3: full of rage and anger, you know, you can't imagine
13:56
Speaker 3: it's good for the outcome of your work. There's a
13:59
Speaker 3: phrase my wife likes about cooking, which is the mood
14:03
Speaker 3: is in the food.
14:04
Speaker 2: Oh, I love that.
14:05
Speaker 3: It's a nice phrase, isn't it? And it actually makes
14:07
Speaker 3: you think of where else have we, we, we of
14:10
Speaker 3: course have some very sort of asshole centric or, um,
14:14
Speaker 3: a profession is allegedly is of course your original one,
14:18
Speaker 3: the chef, the chef, your original inspiration. Yes.
14:21
Speaker 2: I mean, we, we, we, we've got some famous chefs
14:23
Speaker 2: who that's what they're, that's what.
14:24
Speaker 3: That's the whole thing, you know, that, that, that, that, that.
14:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's sort of, uh, the whole thing. Yeah. And, and,
14:32
Speaker 2: You can see, well, I mean, this famous guy named
14:34
Speaker 2: Danny Meyer, who's just had a book come out. Shake
14:40
Speaker 2: Shack is his chain of restaurants, but he's got amazing
14:44
Speaker 2: restaurants like Gramercy Tavern and everything. And he's sort of
14:47
Speaker 2: famous as being sort of like a non-asshole guy to
14:49
Speaker 2: work for who creates a very warm environment for his
14:53
Speaker 2: employees and so forth. but yeah, that's a pretty, it
14:56
Speaker 2: can be a pretty nasty business. But if you think
14:59
Speaker 2: about that, it's, it's almost like one of those businesses
15:01
Speaker 2: that's designed to have it because there's big power differences
15:04
Speaker 2: when there's big power differences. That's one thing between the
15:07
Speaker 2: chef and everybody else between the customers and the employees.
15:10
Speaker 2: And there's constant time pressure. So I, I mean, that's,
15:15
Speaker 2: that's to me like the hallmark of being in the
15:17
Speaker 2: kitchen is just constant pressure to not screw things up
15:20
Speaker 2: and to do them as fast as possible. And everybody's
15:22
Speaker 2: always impatient.
15:24
Speaker 3: A hundred percent. Since you, the book did a lot
15:27
Speaker 3: to kind of spotlight the issue of what we now
15:31
Speaker 3: think of as workplace toxicity.
15:33
Speaker 2: Yes, yes.
15:35
Speaker 3: You know, how would you see that or that underlying
15:39
Speaker 3: reality is having evolved in subsequent years?
15:43
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I did not invent the notion
15:47
Speaker 2: of assholes. They were always with us, and there always
15:49
Speaker 2: has been the notion of toxic workplaces.
15:52
Speaker 3: For sure, for sure.
15:53
Speaker 2: And I do think sometimes it goes too far when
15:55
Speaker 2: people are thin-skinned and they feel these microaggressions that my
15:58
Speaker 2: boss just glares at me. I mean... I think that
16:02
Speaker 2: is a problem. But I do think that in some ways,
16:05
Speaker 2: it's not like I invented it. It's sort of like
16:07
Speaker 2: I was a part of the wave. So the timing
16:11
Speaker 2: was quite good for the no asshole rule. But at
16:17
Speaker 2: least in the academic literature, which I know well, and
16:20
Speaker 2: certainly we can look in the popular press, that just
16:24
Speaker 2: it's a growth industry. If you look at research like
16:28
Speaker 2: abusive supervision, workplace bullying, and then there's cyber bullying. And
16:34
Speaker 2: now I guess, is there AI bullying? I'm sure there is.
16:38
Speaker 3: Where AI bullies you or you bully AI?
16:42
Speaker 2: So this sort of leaks into the Friction project, my
16:46
Speaker 2: latest book with Huggy Rao. But the thing that drives
16:49
Speaker 2: me nuts, because I'm very interested in friction and there's
16:53
Speaker 2: this idea that if you're a good employer, leader, whatever,
16:58
Speaker 2: or maybe even a family member, you are a trustee
17:00
Speaker 2: of others' time. You don't waste their time. And AI
17:04
Speaker 2: is the most efficient invention ever for one person to
17:08
Speaker 2: waste time of many. You can send long emails. Have
17:13
Speaker 2: you seen these agents for scheduling meetings? I had this experience.
17:19
Speaker 2: I've been doing some research on AI like everybody else
17:22
Speaker 2: in Silicon Valley. And I was pissed off because... I
17:26
Speaker 2: was trying to interview a guy just like, just like
17:29
Speaker 2: we did the interview here. You, uh, I mean, so,
17:33
Speaker 2: so this woman, Ella, she was fantastic. She contacted me.
17:36
Speaker 2: She seemed like a real human being in terms of scheduling.
17:39
Speaker 3: Ella's a real human being.
17:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
17:41
Speaker 3: Shout out to Ella, our super producer. Yeah.
17:43
Speaker 2: She was fantastic. Yeah. I'm trying to hire somebody like Ella,
17:47
Speaker 2: possibly do my own.
17:47
Speaker 3: Don't hire Ella. Okay.
17:50
Speaker 2: Well, we're interviewing. So, so anyway, so, uh, so anyway,
17:54
Speaker 2: so the, So I'm working with my co-author, Rebecca Hines,
17:58
Speaker 2: on this AI report. So we're trying to do research
18:00
Speaker 2: on AI, like what works in the AI. And I'm
18:03
Speaker 2: trying to get an interview with this guy. And this bitch, Kieran,
18:06
Speaker 2: keeps sending me, like I have an out of the
18:08
Speaker 2: office message. And she's sending me six emails a day
18:12
Speaker 2: that are getting increasingly nasty because I'm not responding to
18:15
Speaker 2: her scheduling thing. And so I say to my co-author, Rebecca,
18:19
Speaker 2: I said, this bitch, Kieran, she won't leave me alone.
18:21
Speaker 2: She said, oh, yeah, that's just a scheduling bot. And
18:26
Speaker 2: if you think about it, this meant that the interview
18:28
Speaker 2: subject didn't even know that his scheduling bot was doing this.
18:31
Speaker 2: I talked to him later. He just unleashed it on
18:33
Speaker 2: all these. It was just remarkably difficult to deal with Kieran.
18:39
Speaker 2: And she was pretty unpleasant. And so we can write
18:43
Speaker 2: long emails.
18:43
Speaker 3: Did you say that the bot was called Karen as well?
18:46
Speaker 2: K-I-R-A-N.
18:48
Speaker 3: Okay, Karen. It's quite close to one of the more
18:51
Speaker 3: loaded names in the modern world, of course.
18:53
Speaker 2: Oh, Karen. Yeah, not Karen.
18:55
Speaker 3: Quite near, yeah.
18:56
Speaker 2: In my life, she was a Karen. But that's just
18:59
Speaker 2: an example. We can send long emails. I don't know
19:02
Speaker 2: about you. I get these AI-generated pitches that sound personal,
19:06
Speaker 2: but when you read them even slightly closely. I actually
19:08
Speaker 2: deleted three today from fake book clubs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:12
Speaker 2: And so, yeah, so scammers and so forth, politicians, they
19:16
Speaker 2: can drive us crazy with their bots even more so
19:18
Speaker 2: than usual. So I think there's a certain sort of,
19:23
Speaker 2: if I expand the term assholism there, that lack of
19:26
Speaker 2: respect for people's time and using it to heap load
19:30
Speaker 2: on others is really a big problem. Yeah.
19:35
Speaker 3: In the book, The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make
19:38
Speaker 3: the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, you
19:41
Speaker 3: don't just have the notion of bad friction, you have
19:43
Speaker 3: the notion of good friction also. Let's unpack the latter
19:48
Speaker 3: a little bit further, Bob, if you would.
19:50
Speaker 2: Good friction yeah yeah so so good friction is so
19:54
Speaker 2: uh even though many things uh can be fast and
19:57
Speaker 2: easy that lots of things in life should be difficult
20:01
Speaker 2: uh slower um harder uh and and just uh I
20:08
Speaker 2: guess that's.
20:09
Speaker 3: What you were alluding to, right? Things that should take
20:11
Speaker 3: a while so you are deterred from doing them. Do
20:14
Speaker 3: you know what I mean? Or you only do them
20:16
Speaker 3: when they matter.
20:17
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, just to go down sort of like
20:20
Speaker 2: the range, let's start with, so there's a woman, actually
20:23
Speaker 2: a Stanford dropout named Elizabeth Holmes who is now in jail.
20:26
Speaker 2: There's going to be a fantastic documentary coming out about her.
20:31
Speaker 3: Every American I know, and I know a lot of Americans, Bob,
20:34
Speaker 3: wants to talk to me about this Elizabeth Holmes documentary.
20:36
Speaker 3: And I'm like, I never even heard of a woman. Honestly,
20:40
Speaker 3: she didn't make it over the pond, but they all,
20:42
Speaker 3: they send me the trailer. Everyone's obsessed.
20:44
Speaker 2: So my daughter, who volunteers in the theater where that
20:47
Speaker 2: was shown, has actually seen that movie twice. She's one
20:50
Speaker 2: of the only people who's seen it twice. She just can't,
20:52
Speaker 2: she's transfixed with it. So she didn't just see it.
20:54
Speaker 3: Wow. I still don't understand who she is and why.
20:58
Speaker 2: Okay, so what Elizabeth Holmes is, Is this woman who
21:01
Speaker 2: dropped out of Stanford University. Okay. Okay, great. And started
21:04
Speaker 2: a medical device startup that was supposed to, with just
21:07
Speaker 2: a drop of blood, instead of going in and getting
21:10
Speaker 2: all the blood tests, was supposed to analyze all your
21:12
Speaker 2: blood and it was going to be this product.
21:14
Speaker 3: Tell you when you were going to die and, you know.
21:18
Speaker 2: And Walgreens brought a whole bunch of them. Okay. And
21:21
Speaker 2: she tried to sell them to the U.S.
21:22
Speaker 1: Army.
21:23
Speaker 2: And she had all these, she had the former Secretary
21:26
Speaker 2: of State's A general, Mad Dog Mattis was on her board,
21:31
Speaker 2: a four-star general, famous general. And it turned out it
21:35
Speaker 2: was a total scam. They were lying. The thing didn't work.
21:38
Speaker 2: It was a complete made-up scam. So you'd send the
21:43
Speaker 2: blood to her lab, and then she'd bring it out
21:45
Speaker 2: to a real lab. She was totally cheating. So she's
21:47
Speaker 2: now in jail. And she's very charming.
21:51
Speaker 3: She's how'd she get so far with this total spurious
21:53
Speaker 3: made up.
21:54
Speaker 2: Thing was really emotionally she's on the cover of like
21:57
Speaker 2: every business magazine she just she had she had like
22:00
Speaker 2: this whole story she she was somebody who was what
22:04
Speaker 2: well she had a reality distortion zone with no product
22:07
Speaker 2: that worked anyhow so she's in jail so so i
22:10
Speaker 2: think the fact that when.
22:11
Speaker 3: She was the greatest saleswoman of all time is what
22:14
Speaker 3: we're saying.
22:15
Speaker 2: Right charismatic beautiful weird um it just and um so
22:20
Speaker 2: uh So anyway, so oh, and by the way, there
22:23
Speaker 2: was a one of the people who quit told her
22:27
Speaker 2: she needed to read the no asshole rule. So she
22:30
Speaker 2: so there's a there was a TV series about Elizabeth
22:34
Speaker 2: Holmes where she's handed the no asshole rule. So I
22:36
Speaker 2: got a product from Elizabeth Holmes. But but that that
22:40
Speaker 2: that's an example of when she tried to put her
22:44
Speaker 2: her device on U.S. Army helicopters and sell it to them.
22:48
Speaker 2: it was rejected because it didn't have government approval from
22:51
Speaker 2: the federal drug administration in the States. So that, that
22:54
Speaker 2: should be impossible. Then in decisions, if you're making an irreversible, important,
23:02
Speaker 2: complicated decision, uh, firing the CEO, uh, getting married, that's reversible,
23:10
Speaker 2: I guess for some people.
23:12
Speaker 3: And, uh, I'm a Catholic, Bob, so not necessarily.
23:15
Speaker 2: It's more difficult. Yeah, you need special dispensation. So anyhow,
23:20
Speaker 2: so that doesn't seem to have stopped some Catholics I know. Sure, sure.
23:26
Speaker 2: So anyway, but the point is when you need to
23:32
Speaker 2: slow down and make an important decision and analyze all
23:34
Speaker 2: the different parts. Uh, that's, that's where you should have
23:38
Speaker 2: slow decision-making and there's a famous Nobel prize winner named
23:42
Speaker 2: Daniel Kahneman wrote a book about decision-making fast and slow.
23:45
Speaker 2: The late Daniel Kahneman. That's almost the whole point of
23:47
Speaker 2: that book is when you're doing something you've done over
23:50
Speaker 2: and over again, it should be fast. It should be efficient.
23:52
Speaker 2: You shouldn't have to think about it.
23:54
Speaker 3: I don't know.
23:54
Speaker 2: I just, you know, just made my cup of coffee
23:56
Speaker 2: and had my yogurt this morning. I do that almost
23:57
Speaker 2: every morning. That should not, I just want that to
23:59
Speaker 2: be efficient. But, um, or McDonald's hires another employee. This
24:04
Speaker 2: is something they've done millions of times. They don't have
24:06
Speaker 2: to overthink that. But if you're having a big, complicated
24:10
Speaker 2: decision and it's messy, and if it's irreversible, you need
24:14
Speaker 2: to slow down. Then another thing about slowing down, I
24:17
Speaker 2: could go on and on, but my favorite thing, and
24:19
Speaker 2: this is something I've really gotten into since we wrote
24:22
Speaker 2: the book, is there's this wonderful research on savoring. It's
24:27
Speaker 2: the opposite of coping. The lead researcher here is a
24:30
Speaker 2: guy named Fred Bryant who studied it for 40 years.
24:32
Speaker 2: So the thing about what coping is, life sucks. I'm
24:36
Speaker 2: under stress. People are yelling at me. I'm late. I'm
24:40
Speaker 2: in a difficult relationship. Somebody close to me died. All
24:45
Speaker 2: these terrible things that you're trying to not think about
24:49
Speaker 2: it constantly. You're trying to distance yourself emotionally. You're trying
24:52
Speaker 2: to not let it drive you down. That's coping. Savoring
24:55
Speaker 2: is the opposite. And even Fred Bryan sometimes says a
24:59
Speaker 2: rough way of thinking about savoring, it's the opposite of complaining.
25:04
Speaker 2: It's looking forward to the good things, sort of like
25:09
Speaker 2: wallowing in them while they're happening and looking back on
25:12
Speaker 2: them fondly. And I think my hypothesis is that people
25:17
Speaker 2: who engage in more savoring And less sort of moaning, bitching, complaining,
25:23
Speaker 2: looking for the way everything sucks and the way I've
25:26
Speaker 2: been mistreated. Oh, poor me, I've been shat upon by
25:29
Speaker 2: so many. But the people who focus on the good things,
25:33
Speaker 2: those are the people who are less likely to be assholes.
25:37
Speaker 2: And they also create a positive vibe around them because
25:41
Speaker 2: bad emotions are more contagious than good emotions, but good
25:44
Speaker 2: emotions are contagious too. So savoring is an argument for
25:49
Speaker 2: slowing down and sort of enjoying it instead of rushing
25:53
Speaker 2: through and checking off the boxes. Love it.
25:56
Speaker 3: My wife's a psychologist, Bob, and you reminded me of,
25:59
Speaker 3: I think, a psychological nexus or concept that she's fond of.
26:04
Speaker 3: Second time I've mentioned her, which is the victim persecutor.
26:10
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
26:12
Speaker 3: The two sides. Almost like, so, you know, and you
26:15
Speaker 3: keep coming back to the, you're coming back to, The
26:18
Speaker 3: victimized or the victim mentality as often as you are
26:21
Speaker 3: the asshole mentality.
26:24
Speaker 2: We're singing the same tune. In March, at least in
26:29
Speaker 2: the States, in North America, we're having the 20th anniversary
26:31
Speaker 2: edition of the No Asshole Rule come out, which is
26:34
Speaker 2: a mild revision and it's got a new foreword. It's
26:39
Speaker 2: the way I would describe it. And also nobody would
26:41
Speaker 2: blurb it the first time because it had the word
26:43
Speaker 2: asshole in the cover. And now people like Adam Grant
26:46
Speaker 2: and Kim Scott are blurbing it for what that's worth.
26:51
Speaker 2: But there's an argument that I make in the new
26:56
Speaker 2: foreword about savoring. And I'm thinking of academia. So in academia,
27:01
Speaker 2: especially fancy, prestigious academia that I've been blessed to be
27:05
Speaker 2: part of, There's this thing that happens to old professors.
27:10
Speaker 2: And I've seen it a lot of times that they're
27:11
Speaker 2: bitter because they're not appreciated enough. They're such important scholars.
27:14
Speaker 2: They're being left behind. They're not being treated with enough respect.
27:18
Speaker 2: And I recount something that happened to me when I
27:22
Speaker 2: was 33 years old. I was at a think tank
27:26
Speaker 2: with one of my mentors. His name was Mayer Zald.
27:28
Speaker 2: And he was probably 65 then. I was probably 33.
27:31
Speaker 2: And he walked into my office and he said, you know, Bob,
27:36
Speaker 2: Because I was actually looking at my resume. I was
27:38
Speaker 2: updating my resume. And he said, so there's a point
27:41
Speaker 2: where people turn into old academics, and they're just bitter
27:44
Speaker 2: and angry because they're being treated. He said, even though
27:46
Speaker 2: they have unlimited job security, they're getting paid more than
27:49
Speaker 2: they deserve.
27:49
Speaker 3: I was going to say, who has better job security
27:52
Speaker 3: than the tenured academic?
27:54
Speaker 2: Nobody.
27:55
Speaker 3: You have to murder somebody to lose your job.
27:58
Speaker 2: Even then. I think then you'd have to have your
28:03
Speaker 2: pay docked for a year.
28:05
Speaker 3: No teaching for a couple of years.
28:08
Speaker 2: Or more teaching.
28:10
Speaker 3: I was going to say, not much of a punishment.
28:13
Speaker 3: That'd be precise.
28:16
Speaker 2: But Mayer said to me, when some academics get old,
28:19
Speaker 2: they get bitter. And they're constantly pissed off. They're constantly complaining.
28:24
Speaker 2: They make everybody around them miserable. They're constantly curmudgeon. And
28:27
Speaker 2: he said, don't be that person. Try to focus on
28:31
Speaker 2: the good things in your life. So I'm not completely successful,
28:34
Speaker 2: but I really do try to have the attitude of
28:38
Speaker 2: appreciation and savoring rather than bitterness. And I will not
28:42
Speaker 2: name them, but boy, I've got three or four colleagues
28:44
Speaker 2: who are in the age range I am, sort of
28:47
Speaker 2: somewhere in their 70s, all they do is complain about
28:50
Speaker 2: how they've been shat upon. And it's like, they were
28:52
Speaker 2: treated so well. It's just ridiculous. You know, compared to
28:56
Speaker 2: the average human being in the world, including, you know,
29:00
Speaker 2: people who have high paid corporate jobs, those jobs are hard, man.
29:05
Speaker 2: That's what a lot of my friends do. Some people
29:07
Speaker 2: love those jobs, but those are tough jobs. And once,
29:11
Speaker 2: you know, and once you retire, you just disappear in academia,
29:14
Speaker 2: they make you emeritus. And I'm treated with more respect
29:17
Speaker 2: than I deserve, even though I'm allegedly retired.
29:21
Speaker 3: Amazing. So true. So true. Bob, a lot of your writing,
29:25
Speaker 3: you're drawn to the human being, as well you might be,
29:30
Speaker 3: as a psychologist, right? But I'm just curious, because one
29:33
Speaker 3: of my bugbears about AI is its ability to kind
29:36
Speaker 3: of overwhelm the human in the workplace and other So
29:40
Speaker 3: you get correspondence, obviously, put through an NLM and you
29:44
Speaker 3: know about it. And everybody kind of vanishes into this
29:48
Speaker 3: homogenous mass a little bit. And it's eerie. It's a
29:53
Speaker 3: bit like a Stepford Wives-esque almost at times. And I
29:56
Speaker 3: was wondering if that stands out to you and if
29:59
Speaker 3: you see that as a specific danger of this period
30:03
Speaker 3: of work we're entering or we're in.
30:06
Speaker 2: First of all, I'm not completely negative on AI. I
30:08
Speaker 2: think there's lots of things that it is good for
30:11
Speaker 2: and it does help us do our work. There's some
30:14
Speaker 2: hope it will help people move more efficiently and make
30:17
Speaker 2: fewer mistakes and innovate and so forth. But in terms
30:23
Speaker 2: of the humanity part, One of the things that we're learning,
30:26
Speaker 2: and this is from a friend of mine, Perry Claymon,
30:28
Speaker 2: who I've been teaching with for years. He now, he's
30:31
Speaker 2: been teaching at Stanford for some years, but he was
30:34
Speaker 2: a real executive. He was number two at Patagonia for
30:36
Speaker 2: five years and invented the modern snowshoe. He's had a
30:39
Speaker 2: bunch of jobs in the real world. And so he
30:42
Speaker 2: teaches an entrepreneurship class. It's a really hard entrepreneurship class.
30:48
Speaker 2: Your listeners can look it up. It's called Launchpad at Stanford.
30:51
Speaker 2: You'll see Perry in the list of all the companies
30:53
Speaker 2: he's had been started in his class, some hundred companies.
30:58
Speaker 2: And so now he's having the students use AI more
31:01
Speaker 2: and more. And he notices two things that are related
31:05
Speaker 2: to the loss of humanity or less humanity. The first
31:09
Speaker 2: one is because it actually turns out that for AI,
31:13
Speaker 2: it's actually, we're not very good at using it to
31:16
Speaker 2: collaborate with one another. But if you just work alone,
31:20
Speaker 2: it's actually very, if just you and AI, it's so efficient.
31:24
Speaker 2: And so what he noticed is more and more of
31:26
Speaker 2: his startups, the average size of his startups used to
31:29
Speaker 2: be three, four students. Now it's usually, it's like 1.3
31:33
Speaker 2: or something. It's mostly one person teams with all of
31:36
Speaker 2: the agents. So first of all, there's this sort of loneliness.
31:41
Speaker 2: In fact, there's a venture capitalist I know named James Cham,
31:44
Speaker 2: great venture capitalist at Bloomberg. He funds a lot of
31:47
Speaker 2: one person startups and he said they're lonely. So it's
31:50
Speaker 2: just you and the bots. And so that's one part.
31:54
Speaker 2: The other part that Perry talks about, which has got
31:57
Speaker 2: more to do with what it takes to be a
31:59
Speaker 2: great entrepreneur, is he says, so, you know, the great
32:02
Speaker 2: thing about using, you know, the bots is that you
32:05
Speaker 2: can come up with really promising ideas really fast. You
32:09
Speaker 2: can test them and so forth. But what it takes
32:13
Speaker 2: to actually turn into a business is a whole bunch
32:15
Speaker 2: of messy human stuff, selling the idea, pitching the idea,
32:19
Speaker 2: grinding out, dealing with all the rejections. He said in
32:22
Speaker 2: some ways because people aren't as invested in the idea
32:25
Speaker 2: since it's easy come, easy go. When they get a
32:27
Speaker 2: promising idea, they sort of lose the will to grind
32:31
Speaker 2: it out. And he said one of the signs is
32:35
Speaker 2: in the old days when people would pitch an idea
32:37
Speaker 2: that they thought was promising, they would say my idea
32:41
Speaker 2: because I developed it with AI. It's so easy. They
32:45
Speaker 2: don't call it my idea. They call it the idea.
32:46
Speaker 2: They talk about the idea like a third person. That's interesting.
32:50
Speaker 2: It's not my idea.
32:51
Speaker 3: It's the machine's idea.
32:53
Speaker 2: So it's not mine. And again, there's lots of advantages.
32:58
Speaker 2: They can get these ideas really quickly. But this idea
33:00
Speaker 2: of loneliness and this idea of not ownership because it's
33:06
Speaker 2: the machine's idea or the machine's the boss. I'm not
33:10
Speaker 2: dealing with a real human. So those are some of
33:12
Speaker 2: the laws of humanity that I worry about.
33:14
Speaker 3: That's so interesting. And the other thing that makes me
33:17
Speaker 3: think of is that uh leadership uh leaders are motivated
33:22
Speaker 3: in part by an excess the exercise of power which
33:25
Speaker 3: isn't necessarily negative right it can be it can feel
33:29
Speaker 3: wonderful i think to many leaders to to to put
33:32
Speaker 3: food on people's table you know to have to have
33:34
Speaker 3: hundreds of people dependent on them i think they might
33:37
Speaker 3: need it in a sort of for psychological reasons but
33:40
Speaker 3: it's also fulfilling and rewarding and and it's necessary part
33:44
Speaker 3: of the world right it's a necessary part of life
33:46
Speaker 3: and that's my my view of it i don't think
33:47
Speaker 3: it's I don't think power is a purely negative inspiration.
33:52
Speaker 2: You can use it for good or evil. That's one
33:55
Speaker 2: thing I do agree with my co-author, Jeff Efford, that
34:00
Speaker 2: to compare somebody like Martin Luther King or to expose
34:04
Speaker 2: my politics, somebody like Barack Obama, I think they would.
34:10
Speaker 3: Are you going to say Vladimir Lenin?
34:16
Speaker 2: Or John Lennon.
34:17
Speaker 3: John Lennon.
34:18
Speaker 2: Power for good. Somebody who I admire. I mean, he
34:22
Speaker 2: did have a lot of influence, you know.
34:24
Speaker 3: For sure. That's a lot of power.
34:27
Speaker 2: He uses power for good. But to me, power is
34:30
Speaker 2: just a means. towards an end and the question is
34:33
Speaker 2: is what is is what is that that ended and
34:36
Speaker 2: even though i'm not a catholic i'm a fan of
34:37
Speaker 2: the new pope too he's he seems pretty good so he.
34:40
Speaker 3: Seems like a nice fellow to me um what i
34:43
Speaker 3: was going to add to it is that the paradox
34:45
Speaker 3: is that um the fact is if if ai becomes
34:49
Speaker 3: um the principal soul collaborator for many entrepreneurs it actually
34:55
Speaker 3: like is there an exercise of power there? Like imagine,
34:59
Speaker 3: you know, does the asshole get any kind of kick
35:01
Speaker 3: from shouting?
35:05
Speaker 2: So, so the, the paper, literally the paper that I'm
35:08
Speaker 2: just working, I was, I've been working on the presentation
35:11
Speaker 2: right before I got in line with you is that
35:14
Speaker 2: my colleague, Rebecca Hines and I have been looking at
35:16
Speaker 2: the great flattening, this idea that organizations are, they're removing
35:21
Speaker 2: layers and removing managers because supposedly AI can take the load. And,
35:26
Speaker 2: And so some of that, to your point, is... So
35:29
Speaker 2: there's a crypto company here called Coinbase, at least, that
35:33
Speaker 2: used to be successful.
35:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:36
Speaker 2: Brian Armstrong. Their idea is they have a whole bunch
35:39
Speaker 2: of one-person, two-person teams, and then you oversee a bunch
35:43
Speaker 2: of agents. So that's sort of weird. Are you a
35:44
Speaker 2: manager or not? If you have 30 agents reporting to you,
35:48
Speaker 2: but you have no humans, that's kind of weird.
35:51
Speaker 3: And then....
35:54
Speaker 2: And then also strange things happen. Uber, you have Uber
35:58
Speaker 2: in the UK, don't you?
35:59
Speaker 3: Oh, sure.
36:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've even taken Uber in
36:02
Speaker 2: the UK. So in that case, it's sort of interesting.
36:07
Speaker 2: If you're an Uber driver, your boss is the algorithm.
36:09
Speaker 2: It's not a human. It sets your rates. It sends
36:12
Speaker 2: you places. And so somewhere in Uber, there's somebody overseeing
36:17
Speaker 2: all the agents. But in that case, it's... it's sort
36:21
Speaker 2: of a mixed bag. There's some interesting research. There's this
36:24
Speaker 2: woman named Lindsay Cameron at Wharton Business School. And she
36:29
Speaker 2: did research on Uber drivers. She did a bunch of interviews.
36:32
Speaker 2: She also drove Uber herself for some years. And what
36:36
Speaker 2: she figured out is the Uber drivers mostly prefer having
36:40
Speaker 2: an algorithmic boss to a human boss. And the reason
36:44
Speaker 2: is it's more consistent. It's more fair. It doesn't have
36:47
Speaker 2: a bad day. And the other thing is since every
36:50
Speaker 2: Uber driver has the same boss. Instead of, let's say,
36:54
Speaker 2: you and two other people report to a boss, and
36:56
Speaker 2: then you have to get together to figure out how
36:58
Speaker 2: to game that one boss. It's pretty inefficient, but if
37:02
Speaker 2: every Uber driver in the world has more or less
37:04
Speaker 2: the same boss, there's so much information about how to
37:09
Speaker 2: game your boss. And of course, they're always changing it,
37:13
Speaker 2: ways you can sort of run up your fees and
37:15
Speaker 2: stuff like that and get the rides you want. And
37:20
Speaker 2: so anyway, so there's also that sort of, I don't know,
37:22
Speaker 2: it's a dark side, but anybody who's had a boss,
37:24
Speaker 2: you always figure out what's the best way to get
37:25
Speaker 2: the most out of your boss. In this case, you got,
37:28
Speaker 2: I don't know, hundreds of thousands of Uber drivers all
37:30
Speaker 2: collaborating with one another about how to game their boss.
37:34
Speaker 3: Interesting concept. I like it. Yeah, the end of the boss,
37:37
Speaker 3: some way. Points in that direction. Apropos, though, I mean,
37:44
Speaker 3: when you think about the 21st century, defined in a
37:49
Speaker 3: deep sense by digital technology right yes yes um and.
37:53
Speaker 4: Yet you know when we look at when we look
37:55
Speaker 4: at it we it's still individual figures who stand out
37:59
Speaker 4: isn't it it's it's bezos is it's elon musk it's
38:03
Speaker 4: um it's bill gates it's steve jobs you.
38:06
Speaker 3: Know there are still these very strong personalities that are
38:09
Speaker 3: i mean whether it's um merely our own myth making
38:14
Speaker 3: as a civilization or their stewardship of recent decades, I
38:20
Speaker 3: don't know. But it's still interesting to me how the
38:22
Speaker 3: personality still has loomed so large in our imaginations, at least.
38:27
Speaker 2: Well, so at least for, as an alleged leadership theorist,
38:31
Speaker 2: that's one of the things I'm supposed to do research on.
38:35
Speaker 2: So I think of the two different arguments in it
38:37
Speaker 2: almost day by day, I go back and forth between
38:40
Speaker 2: the other. One argument is, Well, gee, when you put
38:44
Speaker 2: people in power, they actually have real power. So, I mean,
38:47
Speaker 2: so back to Elon Musk, who I'm not a fan of. But,
38:49
Speaker 2: I mean, the fact that he went into Uber, changed
38:52
Speaker 2: the name to X, got rid of the Borg. I mean,
38:55
Speaker 2: that was mostly, that was an individual doing stuff. I
38:59
Speaker 2: don't know whether it's for good or bad. And with Twitter,
39:04
Speaker 2: I call it Uber, and he changed it to X.
39:07
Speaker 2: So that actually is, that's a sign that a person
39:11
Speaker 2: can have real power. But then there's another set of
39:15
Speaker 2: academic research on the romance of leadership and leadership charisma.
39:19
Speaker 2: And that research shows that we tend to give leaders
39:23
Speaker 2: too much credit and too much blame for what happens
39:29
Speaker 2: in organizations. Because we're entranced by stories of sort of individuals,
39:36
Speaker 2: I think the way to resolve that the best I
39:40
Speaker 2: can do is that early on in an organization, an
39:44
Speaker 2: individual really can matter because they construct it around them. Mm-hmm.
39:48
Speaker 2: I mean, the founder effect really does matter. And then
39:52
Speaker 2: when organizations are at periods of weakness or reorganization, they
39:55
Speaker 2: can do both. And, you know, to go back to
39:59
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley, just Facebook. So I worked with them briefly
40:07
Speaker 2: when they had about, well, I worked with them the
40:10
Speaker 2: last Facebook meeting when I was consulting them. They were
40:12
Speaker 2: small enough. The whole company was in one room, not
40:15
Speaker 2: even that big a room. at a local hotel and
40:21
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg's sort of technical brilliance and indifference and selfishness was
40:28
Speaker 2: on display from the time I saw him in action
40:32
Speaker 2: when he was 21 years old to what.
40:34
Speaker 3: I see now. But he hired you.
40:37
Speaker 2: As a musician? I was working for a guy named
40:40
Speaker 2: Chris Cox who was the 24 year old head of
40:42
Speaker 2: HR and And this is the first time I ever
40:46
Speaker 2: heard of Mark Zuckerberg was when I was in the
40:50
Speaker 2: process of drafting the no asshole rule. And I had
40:53
Speaker 2: I won't name her name, but she was head of
40:54
Speaker 2: product at the time. Maybe they had 100 employees. And
40:57
Speaker 2: and and and and and that was the person I
41:01
Speaker 2: originally worked with. This early had a had a product.
41:05
Speaker 2: And in this woman walks up to me after class
41:07
Speaker 2: and she said, hi, I'm all I won't use her name.
41:10
Speaker 2: And she said, I heard you're writing a book on assholes.
41:13
Speaker 2: She said, yeah, I work for a 21 year old asshole.
41:15
Speaker 2: So I'm curious about her book. And I said, who's that?
41:18
Speaker 2: She said, Mark Zuckerberg. I said, who's that? That's how
41:20
Speaker 2: I learned who Mark Zuckerberg is. And gee, I won't
41:26
Speaker 2: go down the list of things that he has done,
41:28
Speaker 2: but he continues to do really terrible. I mean, one
41:32
Speaker 2: thing that's specific is there's a neighborhood where Facebook is.
41:36
Speaker 2: It's about, I ride my bicycle through this, about two
41:38
Speaker 2: miles from where I'm sitting now. It's over towards the bay.
41:41
Speaker 2: And I'm sort of in a relatively upscale part of
41:44
Speaker 2: a city called Menlo Park. But this is he started Facebook,
41:48
Speaker 2: this huge conglomeration of buildings in a fairly poor area
41:53
Speaker 2: of Menlo Park. OK. And he promised to do three
41:58
Speaker 2: point five billion. I think that's the number of sort
42:01
Speaker 2: of community development in the area. And he just pulled
42:05
Speaker 2: the plug on it. What's $ 3. 5 billion to you?
42:11
Speaker 3: Well, the metaverse did take a big bite of Facebook,
42:15
Speaker 3: I'm afraid, or of meta.
42:18
Speaker 2: He's still one of the richest people in the world.
42:20
Speaker 2: He could have afforded it. It's sort of like when
42:23
Speaker 2: I make a little political donation, he would have been okay.
42:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, I believe it. I believe it. Quickfire cues for you, Bob.
42:30
Speaker 2: Quickfire.
42:30
Speaker 3: Oh, yes, sir. All right. Who's your favorite asshole to
42:34
Speaker 3: read or write about and why? Historical. We can go
42:37
Speaker 3: back as far as you like. Roman emperors, whatever you like.
42:40
Speaker 2: Well, I'm not a very historical person. The person I'm
42:44
Speaker 2: most entranced by, and I had some indirect contact with him,
42:48
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs still was fascinating. Just because he could be
42:54
Speaker 2: so nasty and so nice. So, yes, he deserved to
42:59
Speaker 2: be called an asshole. There's some evidence he got better
43:01
Speaker 2: as he got older. But to me, he's one of
43:04
Speaker 2: the most interesting because he could do terrible things. And
43:07
Speaker 2: then a friend of mine, David Kelly, when David Kelly
43:10
Speaker 2: had cancer, David Kelly started IDEO, started the Stanford D School.
43:15
Speaker 2: So Steve Jobs, this is 2007 when Steve was developing
43:19
Speaker 2: the iPhone. Steve would go to the Stanford hospital every
43:22
Speaker 2: two or three times a week to see David and,
43:25
Speaker 2: of course, yell at the nurses on his behalf because
43:27
Speaker 2: he is through jobs. And he was just such a complicated,
43:33
Speaker 2: interesting character.
43:35
Speaker 3: Indeed. You know, in my experience of life, the biggest
43:41
Speaker 3: asshole I ever knew was, you know, demonstrably the kindest. Huh?
43:49
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is something we
43:53
Speaker 2: could go into, that passive-aggressive or socially skilled assholes who
43:57
Speaker 2: are backstabbers can get the most done because they're really
44:01
Speaker 2: nice front stage and they put the knife in.
44:04
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, it's just that frustration. It's wanting to restructure
44:08
Speaker 3: the world around their will and when it refuses, the
44:11
Speaker 3: fury is up so quickly. Exactly. And to use one
44:17
Speaker 3: last phrase of my wife's, the bigger the front, the
44:19
Speaker 3: bigger the back. That's it. Another maybe irrelevant one. What
44:25
Speaker 3: do you, Bob, like least about AI?
44:30
Speaker 2: Well, just selfishly, well, there's the notion it'll take a
44:34
Speaker 2: little bit for me, but for the friction thing is
44:38
Speaker 2: this idea that it makes it more efficient for a
44:43
Speaker 2: few people to waste the time of the many. And
44:45
Speaker 2: I already talked about some examples. But that's one of
44:49
Speaker 2: the things that I like least about it. The other
44:51
Speaker 2: thing that I dislike about it, and we've already talked
44:54
Speaker 2: about this, there's the sense, it just feels so emotionally detached.
44:59
Speaker 2: It doesn't feel like the gooky messiness of real life.
45:04
Speaker 2: That is where the real joy and pain and love
45:07
Speaker 2: and learning, it just doesn't feel like, the struggle doesn't
45:10
Speaker 2: feel right.
45:12
Speaker 3: Agreed, agreed. Are you polite to AI?
45:18
Speaker 2: Oh, that's interesting. I guess I am polite. I can't
45:20
Speaker 2: help myself.
45:20
Speaker 3: I can't help myself.
45:23
Speaker 2: Emotion, it mostly contains, although when it gives, sometimes I
45:27
Speaker 2: am nasty when it's stupid.
45:30
Speaker 3: Absolutely, which is doing the same thing, right? Which is
45:32
Speaker 3: being an asshole to a robot. It's very hard not
45:38
Speaker 3: to anthropomorphize something that does such an incredible impersonation of you,
45:42
Speaker 3: isn't it? What is the first thing you would remove
45:46
Speaker 3: from a modern workplace?
45:49
Speaker 2: Ooh, the first thing I would remove? Oh, gosh. The
45:55
Speaker 2: first thing that I would remove is Slack. If I
46:00
Speaker 2: had power, I would just ban Slack completely. In terms
46:06
Speaker 2: of my least favorite software tool, and I'm sure that
46:09
Speaker 2: the people at Salesforce that own Slack won't be happy,
46:13
Speaker 2: but when I did a talk at Salesforce, a friction talk,
46:20
Speaker 2: when they asked what the number one problem was, was
46:22
Speaker 2: it was too many Slack messages, too many irrelevant Slack messages,
46:27
Speaker 2: too many long Slack messages. And it's kind of ironic
46:32
Speaker 2: because that's their product. This was like 400 vice presidents.
46:35
Speaker 2: And just having been, so if I could remove one
46:39
Speaker 2: software tool, I would remove Slack and its other evil cousins.
46:44
Speaker 2: Email's bad, but I think Slack's worse.
46:48
Speaker 3: Who would you least like to have worked for? Bill Gates,
46:52
Speaker 3: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos? As bosses.
46:58
Speaker 2: I know people who've worked for all four pretty directly.
47:02
Speaker 3: Give us some pen portraits then.
47:04
Speaker 2: Let's move through them.
47:06
Speaker 3: I've known people who've worked for him with three of them.
47:11
Speaker 3: I've not known anyone who worked for Jeff Bezos.
47:13
Speaker 2: Elon would be the worst among people who've worked for him.
47:17
Speaker 2: Because his last minute demands, his narcissism. The fact that
47:24
Speaker 2: when he wants to get something done, he'll stay there
47:26
Speaker 2: the whole time. I heard a Bill Gates story just
47:30
Speaker 2: last week. I may get in trouble for this.
47:33
Speaker 3: This is an amazing story.
47:34
Speaker 2: This is an amazing story. So this was somebody who
47:39
Speaker 2: was brought in, I won't even say where, to help
47:41
Speaker 2: him clean up his act because he was causing a
47:43
Speaker 2: lot of damage.
47:45
Speaker 3: And they had a signal that, What decade is this?
47:48
Speaker 3: What decade is this?
47:49
Speaker 2: This is about, let's say 20 years ago. Okay. 15,
47:52
Speaker 2: 20 years. I got to be a little vague because
47:54
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm supposed to, but it's so good.
47:56
Speaker 2: It's an asshole management source. It's one of my favorite assholes. Okay.
47:59
Speaker 2: So here was the signal. This guy would sit in
48:01
Speaker 2: the room and Bill would be in the meetings and
48:04
Speaker 2: they had an understanding that when Bill was going off
48:07
Speaker 2: and being nasty.
48:08
Speaker 3: Getting his voice getting high pitched, his voice raising, starting
48:11
Speaker 3: to insult people. Yeah, I heard about this.
48:13
Speaker 2: So the signal was this guy, because Bill drinks a
48:16
Speaker 2: lot of Diet Coke, this guy would hand Bill a
48:18
Speaker 2: Diet Coke. And it was a signal to Bill, tone
48:22
Speaker 2: down the act, you're being an asshole.
48:23
Speaker 3: Easy, yep, go easy.
48:24
Speaker 2: This could be like a whole chapter in an asshole
48:27
Speaker 2: management thing, which are the subtle signals if you're an
48:30
Speaker 2: asshole that you get to tone down your act. But yeah,
48:33
Speaker 2: so Bill.
48:34
Speaker 3: I wonder why he wanted to tone down his ass
48:37
Speaker 3: or that, but just because he was getting sued or
48:39
Speaker 3: cause he was losing.
48:40
Speaker 2: He was aware. It is interesting.
48:43
Speaker 3: He had some self-awareness about it.
48:45
Speaker 2: So this is, I think the difference between Musk, Musk
48:49
Speaker 2: does not seem to have this. They, I think Bezos
48:52
Speaker 2: has some of this, but, but both jobs and, and
48:56
Speaker 2: I have a lot of evidence about jobs from, in fact,
48:59
Speaker 2: this is in some of my books, especially from Ed Catmull.
49:02
Speaker 2: who ran Pixar and met with Steve Jobs once a
49:05
Speaker 2: week for 25 years, so he really saw the arc.
49:09
Speaker 2: There's a lot of evidence that Jobs had more self-awareness
49:12
Speaker 2: and got better over time.
49:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. More complex personality.
49:17
Speaker 2: I think Musk is getting worse, from what we can tell.
49:21
Speaker 3: Musk, in some ways, from the people I've spoke to,
49:25
Speaker 3: Musk's brilliance was impressed upon me when I got to
49:29
Speaker 3: talk to somebody who reported to him. He genuinely, apparently,
49:35
Speaker 3: rethinks everything in the business. reduces everything so it's nuts
49:39
Speaker 3: and bolts and reconstitutes it in a new in a
49:42
Speaker 3: new way in a way which you know make it
49:44
Speaker 3: made some sense of how just how successful he's been
49:47
Speaker 3: you know he which is different to whether he's a
49:51
Speaker 3: pleasant uh chap.
49:52
Speaker 2: Yeah i i think he's brilliant i just would not
49:55
Speaker 2: be anywhere near him but but he's also got this
49:57
Speaker 2: thing that he thinks he knows everything the amount of
49:59
Speaker 2: damage that he and his doge people did to the u.s
50:01
Speaker 2: government is just staggering um Maybe that was what his
50:04
Speaker 2: goal was, was to make it so the government worked
50:07
Speaker 2: less well, so he could say, see, government control of
50:09
Speaker 2: any kind sucks. But that sort of overconfidence is a problem.
50:14
Speaker 3: What was your... Because I've never spoken to anybody who
50:17
Speaker 3: reported to Jeff Bezos, so I'm curious what the reports
50:20
Speaker 3: were like.
50:21
Speaker 2: This is the older version of Bezos, but when I
50:24
Speaker 2: did a little bit of work with Amazon some years ago,
50:26
Speaker 2: Bezos was very much admired for... the clarity with which, um, and,
50:33
Speaker 2: and I generally, he was not known as an asshole
50:35
Speaker 2: to work with very, he could make, uh, you know,
50:39
Speaker 2: hard decisions, but what he was famous for was for
50:42
Speaker 2: really encouraging people, um, especially when decisions were reversible to
50:47
Speaker 2: just try shit and not worry about it, whether it
50:50
Speaker 2: works or not, we can afford the failure. Let's just
50:52
Speaker 2: go for it. And, and, and, and quite good about, uh,
50:56
Speaker 2: not holding people, uh, responsible. I mean, not a particularly
51:01
Speaker 2: nice culture, but it isn't really nasty. It's just, it
51:06
Speaker 2: had clear values. I mean, just some years ago, 2014,
51:09
Speaker 2: I gave a talk there on my book with Huggy Rahn,
51:13
Speaker 2: Scaling Up Excellence. And one thing I always argue is
51:18
Speaker 2: that I may not like your culture, but in an
51:20
Speaker 2: effective culture, people know what the rules are. And I
51:25
Speaker 2: remember asking a group of 60 diverse people, what's sacred
51:29
Speaker 2: and what's taboo here. I mean, everything from people at
51:31
Speaker 2: AWS to, you know, the website to bookstores in those days.
51:36
Speaker 2: And almost together, they saying, what's sacred is the customer.
51:39
Speaker 2: What's taboo is wasting money. Uh, they focused on the
51:42
Speaker 2: customer experience. They're cheap as hell.
51:45
Speaker 3: That's, uh, that's, uh, that's Amazon in a nutshell, isn't it?
51:49
Speaker 3: You know, terrifying kind of, uh, efficiency and value. Um,
51:56
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Sutton. Bob, you've lived up to
52:00
Speaker 3: and exceeded my grandiose expectations.
52:03
Speaker 2: Of how your show has been. It was fun. I
52:06
Speaker 2: loved their comments, and I love some of your quotes
52:09
Speaker 2: from your wife. They were pretty good.
52:11
Speaker 3: I know. I appreciate you, Bob. Everybody, be sure to
52:16
Speaker 3: pick up a copy of The Friction Project, How Smart
52:19
Speaker 3: Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder,
52:21
Speaker 3: as well as much discussed no asshole rule which i
52:24
Speaker 3: think you just.
52:25
Speaker 1: Do you have a 20th anniversary i don't the 20th
52:28
Speaker 1: anniversary yeah i'm not sure it's going to be it's
52:31
Speaker 1: going to appear in the uk because there's all these
52:33
Speaker 1: different markets sure sure sure march.
52:36
Speaker 2: 2nd it's the new version is coming out in the
52:39
Speaker 2: in the states and let's see if my agent can
52:41
Speaker 2: sell to the uk publisher too but you can buy
52:44
Speaker 2: it you can certainly buy it.
52:46
Speaker 3: So well many of our listeners are most of them
52:48
Speaker 3: are in the us so they may know how to
52:49
Speaker 3: go all And I will have links to both in
52:51
Speaker 3: the show notes. And Bob, it's been an absolute pleasure.
52:53
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, sir.
52:55
Speaker 2: Thank you, Tom. Delighted to talk to you. Have a
52:57
Speaker 2: good evening.
52:58
Speaker 3: Have a great evening.
53:00
Speaker 2: Bye-bye.
53:04
Speaker 3: That's it for this week's Deck Show.
53:06
Speaker 2: We'll be back next week.
53:07
Speaker 3: And if you don't already, be sure to follow the
53:09
Speaker 3: show so you don't miss an episode.
53:11
Speaker 2: Until next time.