Robert I. Sutton's Blog

Dear Readers,

I stopped blogging here actively about 10 years ago. If you are interested in my newer work, check out bobsutton.net, my posts on LinkedIn, and on X/Twitter.  That said, there is still a lot of old stuff here you might find interesting. A good place to start is the list to the right of "15 Posts People LIke."  These days I am focused on a new book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, with my pay Huggy Rao. It took us a good seven years to write that thing, and we are enjoying talking to a lot of smart people about the idea, and now and then, helping them use the ideas to make their organizations a bit more productive, creative, and most of all, humane.  I am also having a lot of fun talking with my friends about my next writing project.  I am not sure what it will be, something short, soul authored, rather personal, and not as serious as my recent books. 

Thanks!  Bob Sutton

The No Asshole Rule was published 10 years ago. It focused on building civilized workplaces. Yet the most frequent question that it provoked were variations of "Help. I am dealing with an asshole (or a bunch of them), what do I do?"  

People asked it in some form or another in the most of the 8000 or so emails that I got about that book and in hundreds of casual conversations.  I've been asked it by numerous of journalists (for both professional and personal reasons) and by critics of The No Asshole Rule who complained that the book devoted just one short chapter to addressing it.  I've heard it from all kinds of people of all kinds including cashiers at Costco, Jewish Cantors and Catholic Priests, executive assistants,  young lawyers who worked for nasty partners, old lawyers who worked with nasty clients, a CEO who felt oppressed by "boardholes" and "douche boards," airline customers and pilots, and on and on. 

During the past decade, I took care to save the emails and other bits that people sent me about workplace jerks and other kinds of assholes. And I spent a few hours each week reading and cataloging the growing pile of academic research on all things asshole including abusive supervision, rudeness, "mobbing," abusive customers, negative emotions, air rage, and such.  But it took me years to returned to writing about the asshole problem again.

I got distracted by writing two other books, other adventures such as the Designing Organizational Change Project at Stanford, and life in general.   But the ten year anniversary The No Asshole Rule inspired me to devote much of 2016 to writing a book that gives the best answers I can muster to all those people who keep asking me that question. The Asshole Survival Guide was published in September 2017.  

I am posting plug for my latest book on this old Work Matters blog, in part, as a kind of goodbye to the active life of this site.  I may still post stuff here occasionally, but I am now using my new All Things Bob Sutton site as the main place where I post things and as the main first "stop" to find my work.

 This post completes a cycle that was started back in in 2006 when Diego Rodriguez of IDEO and Metacool fame convinced me to give this new fangled blogging thing a try.  Diego thought it would be a good way to create buzz for my forthcoming asshole book and he knew that I liked to write about leading and dealing with workplaces.  Over the past few years, I haven't been blogging here much, and most stuff I have written has appeared on my LinkedIn Influencer pages, sometimes at Harvard Business Review and Medium, and at stray places such as INC and the McKinsey Quarterly.  

Yet when I look at this site, I am amazed by how how many pieces I've posted here (many of which took a day or more to write), by the number, range, and quality of comments people have posted, by the wonderful lessons readers have taught me, and by all the connections I've made with people who reached out to me. My first real post (after deleting a couple of experiments) appeared on june 13th, 2006. It was called "Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal": I challenged a myth, or a least a severe oversimplification, that research proves brainstorming doesn't work.  My Typepad dashboard shows that there are 1180 posts on this site ( I wrote all but one or two) and 5648 reader comments.  The site has had almost 4 million pageviews (3868829) since it was launched and averages 975 views per day (I am sure many are bots!).  

I am not shutting down this site. Rather, I am going to pretty it up a little bit over the next couple weeks and keep it as an archive, which will remain at www.bobsutton.org and at bobsutton.typepad.com -- and I may update it in small ways now and then.   The new book prompted me to think about how I want to bring together my varied past work, including the stuff on this blog, and to provide one stop shopping for my new stuff as well.  So I just launched a new website called "All Things Bob Sutton" that is at bobsutton.net (which now directs you to the new site instead of this one).  I worked with Liz Mortati,a great web designer who Adam Grant recommended to me. The new site contains links to my various stuff, including this site, and to various other posts and articles, videos, and quizzes like the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE). And it will be updated with new stuff I've got cooking. 

I invite you to follow me to the new site. There will be a lot more action there this year than there has been at the Work Matters blog in a long time. And I especially want to thank everyone who has read this blog, made comments, spread the word about various posts, and written in me in recent years to nudge me to start posting here more often.  I hope you like the new place.  

The No Asshole Rule was published 10 years ago. It focused on building civilized workplaces. Yet the most frequent question that it provoked were variations of "Help. I am dealing with an asshole (or a bunch of them), what do I do?"  

People asked it in some form or another in the most of the 8000 or so emails that I got about that book and in hundreds of casual conversations.  I've been asked it by numerous of journalists (for both professional and personal reasons) and by critics of The No Asshole Rule who complained that the book devoted just one short chapter to addressing it.  I've heard it from all kinds of people of all kinds including cashiers at Costco, Jewish Cantors and Catholic Priests, executive assistants,  young lawyers who worked for nasty partners, old lawyers who worked with nasty clients, a CEO who felt oppressed by "boardholes" and "douche boards," airline customers and pilots, and on and on. 

During the past decade, I took to care to save the emails and other bits that people sent me about workplace jerks and other kinds of assholes. And I spent a few hours each week reading and cataloging the growing pile of academic research on all things asshole including abusive supervision, rudeness, "mobbing," abusive customers, negative emotions, air rage, and such.  But it took me years to returned to writing about the asshole problem again.

I got distracted by writing two other books, other adventures such as the Designing Organizational Change Project at Stanford, and life in general.   But the impending ten year anniversary The No Asshole Rule inspired me to devote much of 2016 to writing a book that gives the best answers I can muster to all those people who keep asking me that question.

The Asshole Survival Guide will published in September of this year.  You can pre-order it now if you like-- pre-orders are one of the best things that readers can do to help a new book (and warm the author's heart).  Pre-orders create buzz and, apparently, encourage Amazon and other booksellers to order more initial copies and promote the book because of the algorithms they use (That is why a pre-order is the first thing that most authors do when they learn a friend has finished a book). 

I am posting plug for my new book on this old Work Matters blog, in part, as a kind of goodbye to the active life of this site--it completes a cycle that was started back in in 2006 when Diego Rodriguez of IDEO and Metacool fame convinced me to give this new fangled blogging thing a try.  Diego thought it would be a good way to create buzz for my forthcoming asshole book and he knew that I liked to write about leading and dealing with workplaces.  Over the past few years, I haven't been blogging here much, and most stuff I have written has appeared on my LinkedIn Influencer pages, sometimes at Harvard Business Review and Medium, and at stray places such as INC and the McKinsey Quarterly.  

Yet when I look at this site, I am amazed by how how many pieces I've posted here (many of which took a day or more to write), by the number, range, and quality of comments people have posted, by the wonderful lessons readers have taught me, and by all the connections I've made with people who reached out to me. My first real post (after deleting a couple of experiments) appeared on june 13th, 2006. It was called "Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal": I challenged a myth, or a least a severe oversimplification, that research proves brainstorming doesn't work.  My Typepad dashboard shows that there are 1180 posts on this site ( I wrote all but one or two) and 5648 reader comments.  The site has had almost 4 million pageviews (3868829) since it was launched and averages 975 views per day (I am sure many are bots!).  

I am not shutting down this site. Rather, I am going to pretty it up a little bit over the next couple weeks and keep it as an archive, which will remain at www.bobsutton.org -- and I may update it in small ways now and then.   The new book prompted me to think about how I want to bring together my varied past work, including the stuff on this blog, and to provide one stop shopping for my new stuff as well.  In a couple weeks, I will launch a new website called "All Things Bob Sutton" that will be at www.bobutton.net (which now directs you to this site).  I have been working with Liz Mortati,a great web designer who Adam Grant recommended to me.

The new site will contain links to my various stuff, including this site, and to various other posts and articles, videos, and quizzes like the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE). And it will be updated with new stuff I've got cooking, including a place to sign up for a monthly newsletter that I will launch in May, a series of short videos that I recorded for the Stanford alumni associated on how to deal with workplace jerks, and the podcast I am now recording on the causes, cures, and virtues of organizational friction that will appear the Stanford eCorner.

I invite you to follow me to the new site, which will go live in a couple weeks. There will be a lot more action there this year than there has been at the Work Matters blog in a long time. And I especially want to thank everyone who has read this blog, made comments, spread the word about various posts, and written in me in recent years to nudge me to start posting here more often.  I hope you like the new place.  

My Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I devoted seven years to learning about what it takes to scale up excellence in organizations. We studied how leaders and teams build and identify pockets of goodness in organizations and spread such goodness to more people and places -- about the moves needed to grow organizations and to spread superior practices and programs throughout organizations.

We found many splendid consequences of successful scaling: The wealth and jobs created by companies such as IKEA, Google, Procter & Gamble, Facebook, and Starbucks. The needless deaths in U.S. hospitals that were prevented by the 100,000 Lives Campaign between 2004 and 2006 – a successful effort to spread evidence-based practices that was led by a small non-profit called the Institute for Health Improvement. And the thousands of poor children in Africa who are now receiving a superior education (for about five dollars per month) from Bridge International Academies, a fast growing, for profit, chain of nursery and primary schools.

Yet, despite our society's penchant for worshipping such successes, bigger isn't always better. Success is rarely all it is cracked up to be. And our dreams often lose much of their grandeur when they come true.

If you are in throes of a scaling challenge, or plan to tackle one soon, you might try a form of imaginary time travel. Pretend that a few years have passed, that you and your colleagues have achieved your scaling dreams, and that you are looking back from the future. We've found that this "looking back from the future" approach helps leaders and teams with all sorts of scaling decisions. One good question to ask is "Are we happy in the world that we worked so hard to build?"

As we show in Scaling Up Excellence, and this piece on LinkedIn, as an organization grows, whether you like it or not, it will require more hierarchical layers, managers, rules, and (often) annoying administrative processes. It will also become increasingly difficult to maintain personal relationships with all your colleagues (let alone learn their names). The pressures created by a large and successful company or change program often push founding leaders and teams to their limits, require them to do chores that they despise, and to work with people that they find to be bad company. Alas, even if scaling up brings you acclaim and riches, you may be uncomfortable within the walls of your own creation.

Consider this story. About fifteen years ago, I had striking conversations with Mitch Kapor and his wife Freada Klein about their experiences at the Lotus Development Corporation. Lotus began as a small firm that Kapor started with a few friends in 1982. Lotus 1-2-3, the company’s spreadsheet, quickly became the hottest-selling program for the (then new) IBM personal computer: sales hit 50 million dollars in 1983 and jumped to over 150 million by 1984. Kapor didn’t have the desire or temperament to run a big company, so he remained chairman and promoted ex-McKinsey consultant Jim Manzi to CEO. Manzi grew Lotus to over one thousand people by 1985 and stocked it with many “sales types” and “process types” from traditional corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and IBM. Kapor and other early Lotus employees enjoyed their new wealth, but many were counterculture types who chafed at the corporate attitudes and trappings that prevailed: “The thrill of the start-up had turned into the drill of a major corporation,” as author Robert Cringely put it.

In 1985, Freada Klein (then head of organizational development) did an experiment that confirmed that Lotus had become a place where its founders were misfits. With Kapor’s permission, Klein pulled together the résumés of the first forty Lotus employees. On most resumes, Klein only altered the employees’ names, but she changed Kapor’s more extensively because his past as a transcendental meditation teacher and disk jockey was known throughout Lotus. Klein explained that most of these early employees had skills the growing company needed, but many had done “risky and wacko things” such as being community organizers, being clinical psychologists, living at an ashram, or like Kapor, teaching transcendental meditation. Then Klein did something sneaky. She submitted all forty resumes to the Lotus human resources department. Not one of the forty applicants, including Kapor, was invited for a job interview. The founders had built a world that rejected people like them.

Kapor stepped down as Lotus’s chairman in 1986 because “it wasn’t my ambition to run a big company. I wanted to do this great product and make a big business out of it. But I didn’t find the positive parts of running this big show to be very gratifying. . . . I like to be left alone to do my own thing. But instead, I was a prisoner of the spreadsheet.” Lotus was eventually bought by IBM for $3.5 billion. Since leaving Lotus, Kapor has spent his time working with small companies and nonprofits, where he feels more at home.

I love Kapor’s story because it has so many lessons. It shows that the people who develop great ideas are often ill-suited to run, or even build, the big companies or programs required to spread and sell them. And, as one wise venture capitalist often reminds me, some of the best entrepreneurs and innovators dedicate their days to starting and building social worlds that they will abhor living in – and, as Kapor discovered, that will never hire people like them!

This is an edited excerpt from Scaling Up Excellence, which Huggy Rao and I wrote. It was first published at LinkedIn last month. I  heard this  story from Mitch Kapor and Freada Klein about 15 years ago, and with their permission, published it in my book Weird Ideas That Work. You can learn more about my ideas from my LinkedIn Influencer posts, Work Matters blog, and Tweets. If you want to learn more about our work on scaling, watch this  interview or check out this INC story.

The first time I taught an introductory organizational behavior class was in 1980 or 1981. I was a second-year doctoral student in organizational psychology at The University of Michigan.  I had no teaching experience (except for one guest lecture I had given to a large undergrad class -- it was terrible; harried and dull). Yet that didn't stop the the Michigan Business School from giving me the chance to teach the class to some 60 students. I sure learned a lot that year... I still remember the strapping 250 pound football player who broke down in tears after he failed a test (to his credit, he passed the class once he started studying harder).  

I have taught various versions of the class perhaps 35 times by now, and in some ways it remains the same.  There are certain topics that, at least in my view, always ought to be included such as motivation, employee selection and socialization, influence, leadership, and teams.  Over the years, I have started emphasizing innovation and organizational culture a bit more, and I do focus more explicitly on evidence-based management and the challenges of weaving academic research with real managerial decisions and actions.  

And perhaps the main change is that I do straight lecture less and introduce more interaction.  Although I still present material, I press students more to comment, to do lots of short writing assignments, to work in teams, to do short presentations, and to do in-class interactive exercises. I also bring in more people from the "real world" who can bring the lessons from the class alive. Every year, I add another small element or two to make the class a bit more interactive and realistic. And now, I put most of the materials on an online platform called NovoEd, which makes things a lot easier.  But the heart of the class happens live -- the platform jsut makes things easier.  It still is a different animal than the leadership class that I help to teach at the Stanford d.school, as there is still a lot of discussion, reading, and writing, while the "d.leadership" class entails embedding duos in organizations with the aim of making them more creative. 

My favorite part of the organizational behavior class is the final exam. Students learn the question on the very first day if class: "Design the ideal organization: Use course concepts to defend your answer."  It is VERY difficult, it forces students to think all term about which lessons matter most and how they fit together, and the best exams are astoundingly good.  And when students try to write it the night before (despite all sorts of measures to stop them, including a draft due about 10 days before the deadline), it shows.  I wrote a post here on the final a few years back, and as I said, I guess my answer to the question is The No Asshole Rule! although I didn't restrict myself to 2000 or 3000 words! 

I start teaching it again in a few days, and I am, as usual, quite excited to do so.   Here is the outline if you are interested (note that about 80% of the links are live and most of the readings are free to anyone): 280_Syllabus_2015Winter_In_Class_JAN3rdRIS. 

This class is taught in the the Stanford Engineering School, as is our d.school class (the d.school is also part of the Engineering School, although a lot of MBAs do take out classes), but I do think that, despite all the hand wringing about how irrelevant traditional management education is becoming and how the MBA education is going to become "disrupted" is overblown.  Yes, we are moving things onto the web for efficiency reasons, and a lot of the stuff on the web is becoming more social, interactive, and realistic.  But there is still no substitute for a live class discussion, having an in person interaction with someone like IDEO's marketing head  Whitney Mortimer or earlier stage venture capitalist Michael Dearing, or sitting down, face to face, and going through line after line of a draft with a student.  In fact,my view is that what we've been learning from online education is teaching us to make in-class education better (to focus on what works best live and in-person) and what we learn in-class makes online education better (e.g., an online "lecture" is a lot better after you have given it live to 10 or 15 groups).  In addition, it many cases, the dividing line between "online" and "off" is blurring, as we might give students an assignment online, then have them do it live in-class or in a company, and then perhaps post it on an online platform.  

So while there always bumps along the way, I am optimistic that "traditional" business education is changing for the better as a result of all the online stuff, and the online stuff will keep getting better too, but it won't go away anytime soon. 

I have been maintaining – and occasionally updating -- a list of “Books Every Leader Should Read” on this Work Matters blog since 2011. These are books that have taught me much about people, teams, and organizations -- while at the same time -- provide useful guidance (if sometimes indirectly) about what it takes to lead well versus badly. This is the latest update. I just updated the list over at LinkedIn and have included it here as well. I have expanded it to 12 books this year and, even with that, I left out many of my favorites – and probably many of yours as well. After all, some 11,000 business books are published in the United States every year.

Many on the list are research based, others tell detailed stories, and only two are quick reads (Orbiting the Giant Hairball and Parkinson’s Law). That reflects my bias. I lean toward books that have real substance beneath them. This runs counter to the belief in the business book world at the moment that people will only buy and read books that are very short and simple – and have just one idea. So, if your kind of business book is The One Minute Manager (which frankly, I like too... but you can read the whole thing in 20 or 30 minutes), then you probably won't like most of these books.

1. The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. A masterpiece of evidence-based management -- the strongest argument I know that "the big things are the little things.

2. Influence by Robert Cialdini. The classic book about how to persuade people to do things, how to defend against persuasion attempts, and the underlying evidence. I have been using this in class at Stanford for over 25 years, and I have had dozens of students say to me years later "I don't remember much else about your class, but I still use and think about that Cialdini book."

3. Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. A modern masterpiece, already a classic after just a few years. How to design ideas that people will remember and act on. I still look at it a couple times a month and I buy two or three copies at a time because people are always borrowing it from me. I often tell them to keep it because they rarely give it back anyway. And, for my tastes, it has the best business book cover of all time -- the duct tape even looks and feels real.

4. Thinking, Fast and Slow TDaniel Kahneman. Even though the guy won the Nobel Prize, this book is surprisingly readable. A book about how we humans really think, and although it isn't designed to do this, Kahneman also shows how and why so much of the stuff you read in the business press is crap.

5. Collaboration by Morten Hansen. He wrote a hot bestseller with Jim Collins, Great By Choice, which is OK, but this is a better and more important book. I have read it three times and, in my view, it is -- by far -- the best book ever written about what it takes to build an organization where people share information, cooperate, and help each other succeed.

6. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. It is hard to explain, sort of like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll, as the old song goes. But it is one of the two best creativity books ever written, and one of the best business books of any kind – even though it is nearly an anti-business book. Gordon's voice and love creativity and self-expression -- and how to make it happen despite the obstacles that unwittingly heartless organizations put in the way -- make this book a joy.

7. Creativity,Inc. by Ed Catmull. One of the best business/leadership/organization design books ever written – this and Hairball are a great pair. I wrote a more detailed review of Ed’s wonderful book here. As I wrote in my blurb, and this is no B.S., “This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: making films that make them feel proud of one another. I read this book from cover to cover again about a month ago – there is so much there as Ed brings in so much of his amazing life and gleans so many lessons about leadership and life I confess that I am biased about this book. I have met Ed several times and swayed by his modesty, smarts and how well he listens. The last time we met, Ed told me a great story. He and his editor were having trouble with the flow of the book. So he asked a couple of the Pixar script writers who worked on the film Monsters INC to read the draft and make suggestions. Ed said they spotted the problem right away and came up with a great solution. Ed has resources that other authors don’t! That beautiful cover is a Pixar design too.

8. Leading Teams by the late J. Richard Hackman. When it comes to the topic of groups or teams, there is Hackman and there is everyone else. If you want a light feel good romp that isn't very evidence-based, read The Wisdom of Teams. If want to know how teams really work and what it really takes to build, sustain, and lead them from a man who was immersed in the problem as a researcher, coach, consultant, and designer for over 40 years, this is the book for you. Oh, and if you want the cheat sheet – although you are missing enough that you are mostly cheating yourself -- check out Hackman’s HBR piece, the very definition of profound simplicity, a lifetime of wisdom and (I am guessing) the results of 1000 studies summarized in six concise points.

9. Give and Take by Adam Grant. Adam is the hottest organizational researcher of his generation. When I read the pre-publication version, I was so blown away by how useful, important, and interesting that Give and Take was that I gave it one of the most enthusiastic blurbs of my life: “Give and Take just might be the most important book of this young century. As insightful and entertaining as Malcolm Gladwell at his best, this book has profound implications for how we manage our careers, deal with our friends and relatives, raise our children, and design our institutions. This gem is a joy to read, and it shatters the myth that greed is the path to success." In other words, Adam shows how and why you don't need to be a selfish asshole to succeed in this life. America -- and the world -- would be a better place if all of us memorized and applied Adam's worldview. I love this book -- I give to Stanford students and executives all the time, especially when they worry aloud that, to get ahead, their only choice is to be a selfish asshole.

10. Parkinson’s Law by the late C. Northcote Parkinson. You’ve probably heard of Parkinson’s Law, which he first proposed in The Economist in 1955: “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” I had as well, but I never knew much about C. Northcote Parkinson, nor had I read his 1958 gem of the same name (I didn't even know it existed) until Huggy Rao and I started writing Scaling Up Excellence and my well read co-author pointed me to this collection of essays. Parkinson was quite a guy -- a scholar of public administration, naval historian, and author of over 60 books. For our scaling book, I was especially taken with his arguments, evidence, and delightfully polite English sarcasm about the negative and predictable effects of group size and administrative bloat. I am also a big fan of The Peter Principle, which is similar in some ways, (I wrote the forward to the 40 Anniversary Edition – read it here) but Parkinson’s Law is an even better book.

11. To Sell is Human, By Dan Pink. You might ask, what does this have to do with management and leadership? Read the book. Dan does a masterful job of showing how, to lead and motivate others, to protect and enhance of the reputations of the people, teams, and organizations we care about, and to have successful careers as well, we all need to be able to sell people our ideas, products, solutions, and yes, ourselves. Dan’s ability as a storyteller is what makes this book stand above so many others -- his stories are not only compelling, they make evidence-based principles come alive. To be honest, I had not devoted much attention to this book until my wife picked up a copy and read the whole thing from start to finish in about a day. She then spent the next week raving about all the ways Dan's book would help her as CEO of a non-profit – in everything from fundraising, to inspiring employees and volunteers, to dealing with the media, to convincing new prospects to join her organization’s board. Then I read it myself. As much as I admire Malcolm Gladwell, I believe that Dan Pink just might be the most skilled writer we have at translating behavioral science research. His stuff is so fun to read, it doesn't distort or exaggerate findings, and he does a masterful job of teaching us how to apply the lessons in his books.

12. The Path Between the Seas by historian David McCullough. On building the Panama Canal. This is a great story of how creativity happens at a really big scale. It is messy. Things go wrong. People get hurt. But they also triumph and do astounding things. I also like this book because it is the antidote to those who believe that great innovations all come from start-ups and little companies (although there are some wild examples of entrepreneurship in the story -- especially the French guy who designs Panama's revolution -- including a new flag and declaration of independence as I recall -- from his suite in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and successfully sells the idea to Teddy Roosevelt). As my Stanford colleague Jim Adams points out, the Panama Canal, the Pyramids, and putting a man on moon are just a few examples of great human innovations that were led by governments. If you want to learn about what world class scaling “clusterfug” looks like, read about how the French messed things up – and if you want to learn about skilled scaling (with some horrible side-effects) and the amazing U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, find the time to read this rather massive masterpiece.

I almost added a 13th book: Work Rules by Google’s head of “People Operations” Laszlo Bock, which will published in April 2015. I am about two-thirds through an advance copy; it is a compelling and relentlessly useful guide to how Google selects, evaluates, motivates, and keep learning from its people. I especially love the chapters on “Don’t Trust Your Gut” and “It’s Not All Rainbows and Unicorns” (about Google’s biggest people management mistakes). Perhaps I will include it next year as I am captivated by Bock’s insights and spirited writing.

I would love to know of your favorites -- and if want a systematic approach to this question, don't forget The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

P.S. For self-defense, I still recommend that we all read Isaacson's Steve Jobs – even though it has been a few years, I still keep going places -- parties, family gatherings, talks I give and attend, and even the grocery store where people start talking about Jobs and especially arguing about him. As I explained in Wired and Good Boss, Bad Boss, I have come to believe that whatever Jobs was in life, in death he has become a Rorschach test -- we all just project our beliefs and values on him. That said, Ed Catmull’s chapter on Jobs in Creativity INC. is one of the most compelling defenses of this controversial character I have read.

P.P.S. Also, a big thanks to Chris Fry, who has held senior positions at Salesforce.com and Twitter, and is one of the heroes in our book Scaling Up Excellence. Chris urges me to maintain this list – and for offers gentle complaints when I add something that he believes isn't as good as he had hoped. Chris’s favorite book on the list is Path Between the Seas.

Adam Grant's book Give and Take is, in my view, one of the most important management -- and life -- books ever written because it makes such a compelling evidence-based case that, to get ahead in life, you don't have to exploit people or be selfish jerk.  "Takers" who act that way often do better in the short-term, but if they can learn to avoid being exploited or getting burned-out, Adam shows that "givers" win over the long haul.  On top of this, the blend of Adam's smarts, warmth, generosity, and persistence make him one of the most appealing authors and researchers I know -- and a darn good marketer and someone I am always delighted to help (and I am always rooting his success).  On that note, check out the email he sent out to various friends who have been fans of Give and Take. Check out the goodies, the fun, and that great attitude of Adam's. Spread the word about his book, and help him out, as the message is so great and he is a giver who deserves our help!

Friends, colleagues, and former students,

Thank you very much for your support of Give and Take over the past year. On March 25, the paperback edition will debut. If you like the ideas (or me), it will mean a lot to me if you participate in any of the following ways:

1. Give autographed copies as gifts.  To acknowledge the givers in your life, or deliver a subtle hint to the takers, click here to have me sign bookplates that you can stick in books.

2. Spread the word.  Posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and [insert social media addiction here] announcing the paperback’s arrival will be much appreciated. In the spirit of giving, the opening chapter of the book is now available for free download.

3. Vote for a workplace of givers.  I’m on a global search for the organizations where employees exemplify helpfulness. Winners will receive a giant box of Give and Take books and media attention. Nominate organizations and vote here.

4. Visit me on tour.  I’m speaking at public events this spring in Atlanta, Denver, LA, Philly, NYC, and Washington DC. Here’s the schedule.

5. Sign up for my newsletter. To stay in the loop on my work, click here.

6. Contribute to a Give and Take discussion group.  To start a live book club at your organization, email Marissa Solomon, and she’ll help you coordinate (m.solomon15@gmail.com). For a virtual book club, join our new LinkedIn group.

7. Nominate the most selfish bastard you know for Takers Anonymous.  Just kidding. A 12-step program for taker reform is tempting, but I’d rather focus on helping givers and matchers. That said, if you know people who are self-serving but unaware of it, feel free to share this:

Ten Signs That You Might Be a Taker

10. You look significantly hotter in your LinkedIn profile than in any other photo of you.

9. When a child is asked to draw a picture of you, it sometimes resembles a snake or a weasel.

8. At family dinners, you secretly enjoy grabbing the last cookie.

7. You brag about your SAT score, and you’re not even in school anymore.

6. You’re planning to plagiarize this email to announce your own book.

5. Your Facebook wall is dominated by selfies of you with important people.

4. When your children ask you to read them a story, your first instinct is to ask, “What have you done for me lately?”

3. After reading The Giving Tree, you thought the tree got what it deserved.

2. You’re convinced that most people are takers.

1. You go around telling people you’re a giver.

If you read this far, you must be in a giving mood… or in desperate need of an excuse to procrastinate. Either way, you have my gratitude.

Cheers,

Adam

Adam M. Grant, Ph.D.

Wharton professor and author of GIVE AND TAKE

Web: www.giveandtake.com

Blog: www.linkedin.com/influencer/profadamgrant

Twitter: @AdamMGrant

Magic: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1baNQmnRCVw

I was exchanging emails with a colleague that used to be at the Stanford d.school and now works with schools.  He menionted Brad Bird, which reminded my of an interview that Huggy Rao and I did with him in 2008 for the McKinsey Quarterly, just before he won his second Academy Award (for directing Ratatouille). 

It ended with a great quote that I just love:

Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.
 

Huggy Rao and I continue to be focused on the launch of our new book Scaling Up Excellence.  But every now and then i can't resist doing something different  I got an email the other day from Harvard Business Review writer Karen Dillon. Here is what she asked.  After reading it, I realized that it is such a hard question that I could use some help:

I'm working on a guidebook on the topic of office politics for HBR. It's a highly practical guide, part of a popular HBR guidebook series providing solutions for real-world problems. Each chapter identifies a challenge many people share, gives a real world example, and then asks experts how to navigate the challenge. The goal is to get away from the concept of office politics as a 'dirty' game and instead see it as a way of having a strategy for dealing with the vast array of complex human begins with whom you need to work.

I'd love to interview you for the chapter on how to work with people you really, really, really, really don't like. In fact, I can't imagine this chapter without getting you to weigh in!

Are you game? 

Any suggestions? How have you dealt with this challenge?  What tactics and strategies work?  Which are risky or unwise? 

I also posted this piece over at LinkedIn this morning.  It offers a simple lesson, but one that is often disregarded, and in turn undermines the team and organizational performance, creates dysfunctional conflict. and weakens social bonds. 

In 1957, British naval historian and management satirist Northcote Parkinson painted a cynical picture of a typical committee: It starts with four or five members, quickly grows to nine or ten, and, once it balloons to 20 and beyond, meetings become an utter waste of time – and all the important work is done before and after meetings by four or five most influential members.

As Parkinson would have it, numerous studies now confirm that, when it comes to teams, many hands do not make light work. After devoting nearly 50 years to studying team performance, the late Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman concluded that four to six members is the team best size for most tasks, that no work team should have more than 10 members, and that performance problems and interpersonal friction increase “exponentially as team size increases.”

These troubles arise because larger teams place often overwhelming “cognitive load” on individual members. Most of us are able to mesh your efforts with and maintain good personal relationships with, say, three or four teammates. But as a group expands further, each member devotes more time to coordination chores (and less time to actually doing the work), more hand-offs between the growing cast of members are required (creating opportunities for miscommunication and mistakes), and because each member must divide his or her attention among a longer list of colleagues, the team’s social glue weakens (and destructive conflict soars). Following this LinkedIn piece, findings about group size are reminiscent of psychologist George Miller’s famous conclusion that seven was a “magical number” because people could only hold “seven, plus or minus two” numbers in short-term memory. Both Hackman and Miller found that, once people start trying to deal with double digits, the cognitive overload takes a toll.

These findings help explain why the average restaurant reservation in the United States is for a party of four. Think of the last time you were at a dinner with a group of 10 or 15 people. It is difficult, perhaps downright impossible, to have a coherent and emotionally satisfying conversation that engages each member of the party all at once. Typically, the group breaks into a series of smaller conversations or a few people do all the talking and the others say little or nothing.

Some organizations learn about the drawbacks of oversized groups the hard way. Retired Marine Captain and former U.S. Senator James H. Webb explained why the “fire team” – the basic combat fighting unit – shrunk from 12 to 4 during War II. Webb wrote in the Marine Corp Gazette that this “12 man mob” was “immensely difficult” for Marine squad leaders to control under the stress and confusion of battle. Coordination problems were rampant and close relationships – where soldiers fight for their buddies – were tougher to maintain in 12-man teams. The U.S, Navy Seals have learned that four is the optimal size for a combat team as well. And, the basic work unit at McKinsey, the consulting firm, is one “engagement manager” and three other members. As Intuit’s CEO Brad Smith puts it, when it comes to teams, “less is often best.” Just like on­line retailing giant Amazon, Intuit insists: “Our development teams can be no larger than the number of people who can be fed by two pizzas,” which helps them “stay nimble and make decisions quickly.”

This lesson applies to small organizations too. Pulse News, makers of a “news aggrega­tor” app, was started in mid-2010. Communication breakdowns and misunderstandings flared-up after it grew slightly, from three to eight people. Founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta told us that, after they divided those eight among three teams, people produced better software, did it faster, and argued less. When Pulse expanded to about 12 people (working in four teams, all in the same room), each team maintained a bulletin board that captured their current work to help everyone at Pulse follow what they were doing. Every afternoon at about 3:30, each team also gave a short talk to the company about what they working on and where they needed help. Pulse relied on small teams as it grew to 25 employees and 30 million users; it is now part of LinkedIn, which bought Pulse for 90 million dollars in April, 2013.

The lesson is that, if you are on a big team that keeps screwing up, where members don’t care much about each other, and are fighting like crazy, try some subtraction or division. A Harvard Business School study by Melissa Valentine and Amy Edmondson of a large hospital’s emergency department demonstrates how powerful such moves can be. The crowd of 30 or so doctors and nurses who staffed the department at any given time were divided into multiple six person “pods,” each led by a senior doctor or “attending physician.” After the change, information about patients flowed more quickly and accurately and personal relationships improved markedly. Smaller teams reduced confusion and discomfort about who to ask for help and updates.

One nurse said, before the pods, “You had to walk across the ED all timid” and get up bit of courage and say to the doctor “Uh, excuse me?” With the pods, “Now they are in the trenches with us.” It was also easier to discern which “podmates” were responsible for particular chores and deserved credit or blame when things went well or badly.

Another nurse added:

“Now there is much more of a sense of ownership of each other. I’ll say, “My pod isn’t running well. Where is my doctor?” And he’ll be accountable to me. And the doctors will say, “Where are my nurses, who do I have today?’” People rarely, if ever, claimed each other in this way before the pods were implemented even if they were working together on many shared cases. A resident would have used more detached language like, “Who is this patient’s nurse?” – ignoring that the nurse had any relationship to him – rather than, “Where are my nurses?”

The pods also created big efficiency gains. Valentine and Edmondson analyzed data on 160,000 patients served by the Department during the six months before the pods were created and the year after. After the pods, patient throughput time plummeted by about 40%, from about eight hours (8.34) to five hours (5.29) per patient –without increased staffing levels. This drop not only reflects more efficient use of staff; think of the patients’ experience: Five hours at the hospital sucks a lot less than eight.

The upshot? As my co-author Huggy Rao and I found in our research, scaling is a problem of both more and less. Many hands do not always make for light work, especially when it comes to team size. The first question I ask when a team reports they are locked in dysfunctional conflict, suffering from indifference, making bad decisions, or missing deadlines -- or all of the above -- is “how big is it?” If the answer is more than then five or six members, especially more than than ten, some savvy subtraction or division can create striking improvements. As Valentine and Edmondson's research shows: Leaders become more effective. Efficiency improves. Interpersonal friction wanes. And strangers become friends.