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A-S-S-H-O-L-E, everybody…

OK, so I was channeling Dennis Leary a bit while reading Bob Sutton’s latest book. This book was a casualty of my latest trip to California, in fact it didn’t even make it past the Rockies, though its hard to tell exactly where I was at 30,000 feet. One of the reason I picked up this book almost in spite of itself was the reviews I read on Amazon. I’m glad I spent some time with the book, because its not as straight forward as it seems.

The basic message is clear, let the assholes at work know that they’re behavior is unacceptable, and let them go. My dad has a no asshole work at his shop, and I’m a big fan of it and him for it. It takes a great deal of integrity and commitment to all the other people that work for him, to fire a productive asshole, but my dad has done it when called for, and it makes visiting his shop a real treat as he only has the best people.

The part where this book gets interesting is the recognition that we are all assholes from time to time. We all do things we later regret doing in a professional setting. Immediately for me comes to mind a time when working with a vendor on a software implementation team, I pointed some blame at one of their Professional Services staff, when the client was asking why something was messed up. I didn’t need to throw him under the bus, but I did it anyway, as I was having a really crappy day myself. Thankfully, he confronted me almost right away with a great deal of anger, and I apologized profusely and explained why I did what I did.

One of the things that Sutton brings up are studies that show that the disparity in compensation and power between people within groups causes a great deal of asshole behavior to emerge. This makes sense naturally, as we’ve all worked with people who were great to their bosses, but real assholes to the rest of us (referred to by Sutton as the Kiss-up, Kick-down syndrome). One of the examples he brings up is the discrepancy between CEO pay and the pay of the average employee. In this, I tend to agree with Rosenzweig and Taleb, in that CEOs may have some influence in the direction of the company, but much of the success attributed to them is probably due to random outside forces, and that they are grossly overpaid in relation to their true contributions. Sutton discusses Costco’s CEO James Sinegal who makes 350k, which is about 10x his top hourly workers. This is in comparison to the 500x of the average employees salary that most top companies have.

Another cool thing that Sutton discusses is the Jerk-O-Meter, its a tool developed by MIT that allows the user to get real time analysis of their tone and word choice to tell them whether or not they are being a jerk at any given moment. How cool would this be if it were tied into every cell phone? You would know right away when you were starting to behave like a jerk, and then you could decide if that was called for at the given time. This is refreshing as well, as Sutton recognizes that there are benefits to the person acting like a jerk, and that occasionally acting like one can be a necessary evil (but not a trait to be taken on lightly).

Another interesting tidbit that Sutton throws out is a study by Bluedorn at the University of Missouri, that shows that meetings that are held where everyone is standing take 34% less time than meetings where everyone is sitting, with no loss in quality of those decisions. Having been through more than my fair share of interminable meetings, the next time I choose furniture for a meeting room, it will resemble a bar more than a board room.

Sutton’s book certainly has a great number of items that Rosenzweig would call out as correlated and not causal. I think though it comes down to this, Sutton is right when he argues that life is too short to work with Assholes all day long. Regardless of whats best for business (and Sutton makes compelling arguments that even productive assholes are terrible for business), Assholes ruin your days. And who wants a life filled with bad days?

The No Asshole Rule at Amazon

MIT’s Jerk-O-Meter

Bob Sutton’s Blog