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>>Cliff: Hello, everyone and welcome to another outstanding Authors at Google Talk. It is
with extreme personal pride and pleasure that I introduce Dr. Bob Sutton to speak with us
today. Now, together with Jeff Pfeffer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business,
Dr. Sutton has revolutionized business thought in a world that's oversaturated with buzz
words, with half-truths and dangerous bits of misinformation. Dr. Sutton provides us
with to cross the knowing-doing gap. He warns us against these dangerous half-truths and
he speaks out against *** in the workplace.
[laughter]
So, he's done a big, outstanding contribution to corporate America. Now, Dr. Sutton is,
as you may know, is a Harvard Business School trained Professor. He's currently a professor
of organizational behavior in the Department of Management, Science and Engineering at
the Stanford University. So, he's an engineer at heart and his MS&E 280 class is one that
I took and that many other people took in the audience and it was really one of the
monumental, life-changing classes and inspirational classes while at the Stanford MS&E school.
And he's also the source of my favorite quote from the entirety of grad school that's especially
important if you're trying to decide whether to go to the PhD or do research or actually
work. Dr. Sutton says at the end of his final class, "Work is overrated," so you gotta keep
that in mind throughout your working life.
[laughter]
Now, Dr. Sutton was gonna talk to us today about his latest book, which is entitled "Good
Boss, Bad Boss." It's a follow-up to "The No *** Rule," based on a lot of things
that people wrote in and talked to him about after that first book was published and he
tells what's necessary to make a really successful boss; so something that's particularly relevant
to our work here at Google. And so without further ado, please join me in welcoming him
to our Authors at Google Talk.
[applause]
>>Sutton: Alright, is this thing on? Thank you, Cliff. So, it's always nice when your
former students only say the good stuff cause Cliff knows a lot of bad stuff and do other
people in the audience. So what I'm gonna do is to talk, as Cliff said, about some of
the main ideas in this book that just came out. It actually just came out Tuesday and
it's called "Good Boss, Bad Boss," and following Cliff's comments, let me set up how I got
interested in this book. So, I guess about three years ago, I published a book called
"The No *** Rule," and I, I guess that was my fourth book and I've written lots of
different books including this one, but the level and kind of response that I got to that
book still sort of blows me away. I still, even now, get stories from all sorts of people
all over the world about either the fact that they have an *** that they work with,
that they're worried about being an *** and it just goes on and on. And if you know
anything about the publishing world, it's a little bit like the movie business, which
is that if you have a success in that book sold very well, they want you to do a sequel,
[laughter]
So, in fact, maybe the highlight of this, or the camera's on, but I don't care; my French
publisher, she writes me this note and this is in the introduction to "Good Boss, Bad
Boss." She says, "Dear Bob, when are we going to see the *** *** again?"
[laughter]
Cause, and so, so, initially I so under pressure, I started thinking about writing a sequel,
but as I got into it, I realized two things that I was kind of sick of writing about ***;
just *** frankly. And the other thing I realized is that, is that essentially if
you looked through the emails and the conversations and everything that I was having about it,
really the central character in those emails was the boss. It was either, and I went through
and fairly compulsively at one point counted my emails; it was a lot. And about 80 percent
of the emails, the central character was the boss. It was either the boss who wanted to
be better or it was an employee, very often, who had an *** boss and in some cases
I'd have success stories. They moved from a bad one to a good one or good one to a bad
one; things like that. But it was always the central character and the other thing that
came out in those stories and also in thinking about the academic literature, is it wasn't
just that people wanted somebody who was nice; they wanted somebody who was nice and who
was competent, or civilized and competent. Because if, if that, maybe one of the worst
things in the world is a nice, incompetent boss because you feel so bad when they're
incompetent and they're and we gotta fire them, it's actually really difficult because
you feel so bad; they're such a nice person. So, so, that idea of nice and competent and,
in fact, the way that I'd find a good boss in the book, and this is a definition that
you can see in like, human tribes going way back, is essentially somebody who is skilled
at both performance, competence and also things like treating people with respect; the humanity
part. You know the notion of compassion. So, striking sort of a balance between the two.
So that's how I define them and just sort of as a footnote, sometimes people say, "What
about those bosses who are real jerks and are real inhuman and still make a lot of money?"
And my reaction to that is, "That's great. It's fine if you wanna say that person is
a good boss, but in my value system that person does not qualify as good human being and they're
still a loser."
[laughter]
So, I'm trying to, if you will, look for the sort of delicate balance between the two and
I realize that when you're leading people that's a difficult thing to do. So, that's,
that's kind of a set up for it. So, here's the book, which is here so you don't have
to, the only thing about it. The one thing I would say, and you certainly got this in
Cliff's introduction, is for better or worse, I'm saddled with having been an academic and
publishing in academic journals and being an editor and stuff and so, the main thing
I do like if you do time and motion study of what I do when I write a book, about 75%
of the time I'm reading peer-reviewed articles, but I do realize that most human beings don't
like to read peer-reviewed articles. They are incredibly dulling and dull and boring
and actually not very useful either, although they have implications for utility. So, what
I try to do was to try to have evidence based ideas, but to illustrate them with stories
and in fact, have you ever had Chip Heath here? For this site, he wrote this great book
called "Made to Stick." So, pardon me?
>>audience member #1: [inaudible ]
>>Sutton: Oh, he's fabulous, also got a, he's always in the bestseller list. So, the main,
the main finding from Chip's book, "Make to Stick," is it's statistics show that people
don't remember statistics, they remember stories. So, I'm gonna tell you a lot of stories and
occasionally I will refer to the evidence that this is based upon and that's why my
editor, my only complaint about the book is it has too many endnotes, but I can't help
it. I was sorta ruined by being an academic. Alright, so let's start out with a little
mental provisioning which gets to this evidence based sort of perspective I take. So, so when
I was putting together the ideas and the perspective in this book, in some ways I was led by this
Jimmy Buffet quote, which I'd been following for a long time, which is that, "Some things
are still a mystery to me and other things are much too clear." And so, in the world
of management, or whatever you want to call it, is this whatever, if, if you start looking
at what I would at least describe from my biased perspective, the best peer-reviewed
studies. There are certain things that I don't know the answer to. And I'll give you an example.
It, and the more I read about it, the more confused I get. Well, two of them. One is,
is there a first mover advantage? Whenever I read that literature it looks to me like
a random scatterplot. And clearly, I guess Google will do pretty well at not being a
first mover; how there were a few search engines around before you guys came around. And then
another one is, is the performance evaluation worth doing? So, if you looked across studies
of performance evaluations and suppose you're trying to get FDA approval for it, as like
a, as a compound or a treatment. It, you wouldn't do very well because it sort of looks like
about half the time it makes things better and half the time it makes things worse, which
looks a little bit to me like randomness. Although, there are some organizations that
do better with performance evaluations than other, but my argument is that there are many
organizations that'd be better off having no performance evaluations. And I don't know
how to tell you to do a good performance evaluation and maybe the most satisfying involvement
I've ever had with an organization is one of your former partners, but now kindof a
competitor, which is Mozilla of Firefox Fame and so they have a very interesting CEO, John
Lilly, he really does have guts and so he decided that these performance evaluations
they were doing were so stupid that he was gonna get rid of them. So, Mozilla has no
performance evaluations now. What they do is they have a system with some much, obviously
much smaller and simpler organization than you folks. There's about 12 levels and everybody
at the same level gets paid the exact same amount and they have the same bonus amount
and the only time you go through something like a performance evaluation is when either
you go up a level or you're bad; you're on plan and might be fired. Other than that,
the emphasis is on moment to moment feedback. So, I have a cool solution to the problem.
But the, but that's a digression, but I love telling that story. But, because, I mean,
having a CEO who in, in, is the head of HR did not liked being told to get rid of the
performance evaluation, by the way, because, his argument was how am I gonna get a job
somewhere else if we had no performance evaluations?
[laughter]
Which I think was a little narrow minded. He's no longer there, by the way. So, anyways,
so the, the main idea and main focus of "Good Boss, Bad Bos"s is on areas where at least
I think, from looking at the academic literature, at least it looks to me, not all my academic
colleagues would agree that there's a clear picture. So, the main point of the book, in
some ways, goes contrary to something that you often hear about good bosses or good leaders.
So, maybe many of you've heard the expression that it's not all about you. Like, that's
something they always say to bosses. It's not all about you. Well, I actually think
that's a useful half-truth because if you looked at research on what happens to human
beings, and in fact apes too, when you put them in positions of power, actually in many
ways it does become all about you. It becomes all about you in a couple of ways. One way
in which it becomes all about you is that the people or other creatures that you lead
start paying enormous amount of attention to you; much more than you often realize,
at least based on the experiments and other studies we see. And then the other reason
that it's all about you is that the lot in life where every leader, especially as they
get more senior, even leaders of small groups, is your lot in life is you are gonna get more
credit and more blame than you deserve for the performance of the, of the people you
lead. And, and it's one of those things that, I guess, at least two or three times in the
last five or six years I've done very detailed review of the relationship especially between
CO action and [inaudible] performance and there's lots of little nuances and it sort
of does look like the smaller the organization, the younger it is, the more that the senior
management has an impact. But it sort of looks like the real impact of CO actions is maybe
ten, maybe fifteen% of the bearance of performance, but the amount of credit and blame that leaders
get is usually around fifty% . And this works even if you do little, tiny experimental groups
that so, so back to this notion that it's all about you, that when you're in a position
of leadership, they're looking at you especially the people you lead more closely than you
probably realize. And two, you're gonna get more credit and more blame from everybody
than you probably deserve. So, in some ways, it actually is all about you and, in particular,
I'm not arguing that the best bosses are egomaniac. What they are is actually quite the opposite.
They're remarkably sensitive to the ways that, that the actions they take that affect the
people that they lead in particular. But this isn't easy because there's this asymmetry
problem, and this is something that's established in all sorts of studies that when people are
in positions of power and the people beneath them put, pay much more attention to them
than they pay to their subordinates. So, to give you an example, one of my favorite stories,
some of us will remember the dark days of late 2008, early 2009, even in Silicon Valley,
firms were laying off people; everybody but John Larry I knew was laying off, even Google
had layoffs. My wife, Ceil of the Northern California Girl Scouts, even she had to lay
off staff members. So, it was a pretty sad sort of time. So, I, I wrote an article during
this time on being a good boss in a bad economy that was in Harvard Business Review. So, being
this sort of I guess capitalist professor that I am, I started giving talks about it
for money and one of the talks I gave was to a group of project managers at Stanford.
And after the talk, this guy comes up to me, he says, "Let me tell you the interesting
shoes story." So, here's what happened. What happened was that one of the executive assistants
walked up to an executive vice president and said, "When are the layoffs coming?" Well,
in fact, it was the sort of organization that had planned layoffs. It was very well hidden,
it's, just like the lawyers told them to do kept secret. But the problem was that this
executive was shocked. He couldn't figure out how this woman figured out there was gonna
be layoffs and what she said to him was, "Today is an interesting shoes day." And so this
guy had to tell sort of like when you play poker with someone, when he had bad news,
he would look at his shoes. And so, they figured out from that sort of like bit of leakage
if you've ever read some of Ekman stuff, that there was some bad news coming and very quickly
it turned out to be layoffs. So, the reason I like that story is it sort of really does
illustrate this asymmetry that I call the "toxic tandem" that essentially, one of the
effects of hierarchy is that the people are creatures at the bot-, at the top, they'll
pay nearly as much attention to their underlings as vice versa. So, that's one thing you gotta
realize is when you're in position of authority, people are watching you perhaps more closely
than you might realize. And just as a quick aside, this happens in apes, too. There's
sort of some cool studies about baboon troops. It turns out that the average member of baboon
troop looks up at the boss; the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds. So, I'm wondering,
so you've got these problems in then also, to make things worse, and one reason I call
this ,this the toxic tandem, is there's a lot of evidence that when you put people in
positions of power, a whole bunch of things happen to make them insensitive jerks. And
this is one of the things, there's especially a researcher at Berkeley named Dr. Keltner
and another one at Stanford who is, who have been studying this problem for quite awhile,
Deborah Gruenfeld's her name, and there's probably a couple hundred peer-reviewed studies
that show, essentially, that when you give people power over others, they tend to focus
more on their own needs and concerns. They focus little attention on the needs of others
and they act like the rules don't apply to them. And maybe this is politically incorrect
to say or something, but I think Mark Hurd's behavior, I think it applies to all three
of those; the sort of things that got him fired. I really wonder how cognizant he was
of the, like if you keep taking a gorgeous woman to dinner who doesn't have a very high-level
position and you're a CEO of a company like that, and you're married, I think people notice
and talk about you. So, anyway, so, this is sort of a classic sort of pattern and to show
you what for me is not probably the most rigorous study, but is certainly the most entertaining
power poisoning study, this is the cookie study, which Keltner reports. And essentially
what is, this is, is a study where you have three Berkeley students and they will brainstorming
about a social problem; things like how you make the UC campus more green. Two of them
were brainstormers, one was the boss evaluating what happened, but the key intervention was
about halfway through the conversation the experimenter brought in a plate of five cookies.
Now, we all know the social norm that you don't eat the last cookie. So, the interesting
question is well, what happened to cookie number four? OK? And so here's what happened.
So, this is a study of disinhibited eating, right? So, those with will power they detained
to take the fourth cookie. They tend to eat with their mouths open because they did the
video tape.
[laughter]
places. And, and so the intercorrelation among these three measures of disinhibited eating
was point eight, which was pretty darn good, actually. And, but, but if you go back to
my three things: one, more focused on your own needs, less than the needs of others and
the rules don't apply to me, it's really quite interesting. The other thing I should do for
both the men and the women in the audience is describe the gender effects. It turned
out the men did get somewhat worse, but what really drew, when they were given power, but
what really drove the study was the women who were actually pretty civilized when they
were in the lower power positions, but they became as bad a pigs as the men when you gave
them power. So, the game score for the women was much higher for disinhibited eating. But,
this is sort of a cute study, but the reason that I think it's important and the reason
I bring it up is one of the core ideas in the book is this challenge when you're in
a position of authority of others and people always talk to you about a world without authority,
but I've never been in an organization where there were not power and status differences.
Maybe yours is the one that doesn't, but there are those, some of those people like Larry
and Sergey who seem to have some power. And, and these characters succ-, are things happen
to about everybody who is in power and there's this challenge of the most effective bosses
are in tune with what it feels like to work for them, but a whole bunch of contraveiling
forces make it difficult to actually experience that state. Ok, so that's the set-up. What
I would do, and I want to make sure and leave at least five or ten minutes for a question,
is to talk about some of the hallmarks of in tune bosses. And so let me let me start
with a first one and there's some really cool research around this done by Frank Flynn who's
at the Stanford Business School and some researchers at Columbia, and it's on assertiveness. And
what they've been doing is a series of surveys and experiments where they show that the best
bosses sort of get, are in the middle, in the median of being things like competitive,
aggressive, passive, and submissive; so they're moderately assertive. And also, and by the
way, some of the research shows that being, if you will, being perfectly assertive is
more important for example, than how charismatic you are. The amount of variance explained
looks pretty good. And the point they make, which I really like, is one of the problems
with being a perfectly assertive boss, about not being too pushy or not being pushy enough,
is that, is that people don't notice it because you're not a jerk or you're not ignoring them
too much. So, it's actually, they've got this analogy, it's like a perfectly salted dish;
you don't notice it, the amount of salt. And then the other thing that they emphasize is
it's not like the best bosses are medium all the time. They have that ability to read people
again to be in tune with people to know when to push, to know when to back off and, I guess
I was at, I gave this talk at Disney Studios on Tuesday, a variation of it. And one of
the people from Disney Studios raised her hand and said, "How do I know when I'm perfectly
assertive? What guidelines can you give me?" And my answer to that is that's one of those
places, although I take an evidence-based approach to management and business, in the
end, a little bit like Madison, it's a craft that you act-, you can use evidence to inform
your decision, but in the end that, it takes a lot of experience to be able to do it well,
so no matter how many books your surgeon has read about how to do the surgery, the more
operations he or she has done, the less likely you are to die. This is something that's quite
well established. So, it is a craft that takes time to learn. One little quote to sort of
back this up, although I'm San Francisco Giants fan, this is the famous Tommy Lasorda, one
of the most entertaining coaches in baseball in a long time, he was manager of the Badgers
for about 20 years; still works for the Dodger organization. In fact, I think he's worked
for the organization for about 50 years. He made this great quote the day he took over
managing the Dodgers, which is, "I believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand.
If you hold it too tightly you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it."
So, it's this idea of pushing just hard enough all the time. And again, to be able to do
that, I think it comes back to one being in tune with the people you lead, and two knowing
the work that lead well enough to know when to push and when to back off. Problem: one
of the main times when bosses should probably back off is especially when they're leading
creative work. There's a lot of evidence that when you evaluate and watch people too closely,
when they're doing creative work it causes a bunch of problems because not only does
interrupting them with questions slow them down a lot, when you start evaluating them
more closely, they start becoming afraid to fail. So, they sort of drift back to the tried
and true. And one of, I like my favorite bosses or one of my favorite quotes I've heard about
this, it's from Bill Coyne. He led R&D at 3M for a decade, "After you plant a seed in
the ground you don't go dig it up every week to see how it is doing." And the place where
I heard Bill Coyne say this was at, it was, it was Motorola, this must have been about
2002 or so; he just stepped down and we're doing a panel for a couple of hundred people
and the great thing about former CAs and Senior Executives is they sometimes become very honest
and, and he said this thing which just amazed me because 3M is, in fact like, you have like
the 20% rule, the 15% rule sort of model, isn't that, is it the 20% or 15? That's modeled
after 3M's 15% rule and really one of model of creative organizations and this was like
2002; that's, they were in like, the hop, the top of their era so he, but he said even
though he was running R&D at 3M, there was a problem with senior executives, which was
that when you brought them stuff to soon though, it would screw it up. And so, he described,
it's a, I couldn't believe he said this, he described how part of my job was to bring
the top management team pretty, shiny things that would excite them that I would distract
them from the really important work.
[laughter]
This is like, and this is like, and by the way, it had almost the same story at HP during
their heyday, too, or I don't know what their heyday was, but during a period when they
were doing well. Ok, the second one is for my students who have been around, I've been
talking about this forever and this is the notion of wisdom, so Jeff Pfeffer and I, my
co-author and I had worked on this a lot. And, and the basic challenge here is there's
a lot of evidence that the most effective bosses and leaders instill confidence in their
followers, but the problem with instilling confidence in your followers is that sometimes
you turn arrogant and start believing your own *** a little bit too much. So, so,
the challenge to be a good boss is to be confident enough, so this notion of dancing at the edge
of overconfidence without turning pigheaded, psychologists and philosophers call this the
attitude to wisdom, so it's the courage to act on what you know in concert with the humility
to doubt your assumptions and actions. It's a hard thing to learn; it's easy to say. But
good example of it, and maybe my favorite quote from any former CEO, this is also sort
of came out after he stepped down and this was a interview that I went to, it was somewhere
in Palo Alto, no, in Mountain View or something that was at a Harvard Business School conference
and Andy Grove was interviewed and there's all, there's like three dissertations in this,
in this quote. So, the first one is a pretty good definition of the attitude of wisdom.
"I think it's very important for you to do two things, act on your temporary conviction
as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize you are wrong, correct course very
quickly." So, that's the confidence and humility. And then he goes on to say essentially you
don't have time to test everything in massive detail. You gotta sort of clean up, make decisions
and clean them up later. And then he said something which kind of amazes me and it's
one of those things that I've been thinking about for a long time. "So you have to keep
up, you have to keep up your own spirits, even though you well understand that you don't
know what you're doing." So this is like one of the most famous CEOs and essentially he's
saying that to be an effective leader, you've got to act more confident in what you're doing
than you actually feel in many cases. And on one hand this bothers me because it's potentially
unethical. He's telling you to exaggerate. On the other hand, there's this thing called
the self-fulfilling prophecy. And it turns out that on average, the most effective leaders
probably do this. Exhibit one for our country, the United States is probably George Washington.
If you read David McCullough's "1776", George had a little trouble quite knowing what he
was doing when he first took the job. He got better as he went along, but he was always
was on that white horse and he had the great uniform and he was always clean; most of his
soldiers were filthy. And he always acted confident in a sort of confident, sort of
front-stage; no matter how things were, how screwed up things were, but he had that ability
to learn from his mistakes and to listen to the people who were on, if you will, his senior
team and his soldiers to improve as he went along. So, so I would make an argument that
on average, although arrogance should not be able to adjust as bad, you probably want
a leader who's a little bit more confident than is warranted, assuming they don't have
the rigidity problem. OK, so sort of moving along with wisdom, one of the key things for
wisdom is to actually be able to listen. Here's a nice quote from John Wooden. I, I think
the key quote here is "faking it is worse than not doing it at all." And one of my favorite
examples that sort of gets to this, so this happened about a year and a half ago, one
of my colleagues at Stanford named Huggy Rao, Hayagreeva Rao, we were at an all day meeting
with a quite famous organization. I can't name them because if you look at the NDA I
signed with them, they would shoot me if I named them, but at least it had to do with
lawyers, so we're in this all day meeting and what happened was there was one guy who
was the most senior person in the room; he did all the talking. He talked and he talked
and he talked. And I was sitting next to a more junior person; the junior person's actually
my client and she kept whispering in my ear the PowerPoint text that he was spewing out.
So, it's like, you think about the worst meeting you've ever been to, one of the horrible meetings.
So, finally about 2 o'clock, he sits down next to me, he was quiet and then he looks
at me and he says, "It looks like I'm listening, but I'm not listening. I'm reloading. I'm
trying to think of what I'm gonna say next." And if you think about that, so literally,
even though he was listening, he wasn't even listening, he was thinking about spewing out
more stuff. It, one of the most destructive meetings ever met, and by the way, it's not
like people didn't notice him. There was emails flying around all over the place that this
guy was all transmission and no reception and it, and this is a well round enough organization
that it got back to other senior people and he got slapped around a little bit for his
behavior, so I will give them a little courage for not being a terrible organization. Another
issue, which gets in the way of the attitude of wisdom, is when people create a fear-based
environment. We were talking about this a little bit before. When you create a situation
where people are afraid to criticize you, you as a boss have all sorts of problems.
Exhibit one, if you've read any of the stuff by Michael Lewis, on the meltdown, as usual,
he's like the best author. There was a great Vanity Fair article where he talked about
Joe Cassano. So, of course, it's over simplistic tip, blame the meltdown on any one person.
If you wanted to pick on someone, Joe Cassano would probably be your guy if you read Michael
Lewis. He was head of the unit at AIG that lost 45 billion dollars, but I guess they
were into them for about 200 billion dollars; 180 billion dollars in tax money, so it isn't
all his fault but he was infamous for his arrogance and insecurity, so "the fear level
was so high, if you were critical of the organization all hell would break loose." And I love this
was, "The way you dealt with Joe was to start everything by saying, 'You're right, Joe.'"
And, in fact, if you're the kind of boss and people always say, "You're right," that's
a pretty good sign that maybe you're doing something wrong. And also, there's another
effect which is more subtle and now Google is big enough, you might want to think about
this a little bit, and this is this thing called the Mum effect. So, there's a bunch
of psychological experiments and we start with the experiments that, in general, even
if you're like the nice, you've got the nicest boss in the world and you're the nicest person,
when we break bad news to people, they like us less. And it's just got to do with the
emotion of it. Like, you associate this person with negative emotion and I think that partly
as a result of that, many of us learn to sugar coat the bad news a little bit and if you
start going up the hierarchy and think about the effects of all that sugarcoating, some
pretty bad things can happen. And one of my favorite examples is that some of us may be
old enough to remember a guy named Richard Fineman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist;
he was in the Rogers Commission and the purpose of the Rogers Commission was to try to figure
out the cause of the explosion of the challenge, the Challenger Space Shuttle. As a side story,
he actually figured it out and did this dramatic demonstration at Congress and put a piece
of the tubing from the rockets into a beaker of ice and then he broke it in front of them
and said, "I think this is the cause of the problem." And it was. But one of the things
that he did when he was running around this unauthorized stuff was he asked this question,
which is, "What is the probability that the main shuttle engine would fail?" And the engineers
at the bottom of the hierarchy estimated one in two hundred, and the bosses at the top
estimated one in a hundred thousand. And we, and I, I would like to see the numbers and
we don't have the numbers, but we have some hints of what happened with that BP Oil deck
that blew up. I bet you would get similar numbers because there's a lot of evidence
that the top BP executives were saying that the likelihood of what happened was virtually
impossible. And it did happen. And then the final thing about the attitude of wisdom is
that if you want to create an environment where, if you will, people have the courage
to act on their knowledge and humility and to doubt it, one of the most important things
is to create an environment where people feel safe to fight. So, the idea is to fight as
if you're right and listen as if you're wrong. One of my favorite quotes and one that's a
little more complicated than it seems is that "When two people in business always agree,
one of them is unnecessary."
[laughter]
It's cute, but it's actually, I describe as a useful half-truth because there are many
times when you don't want people fighting, you don't want people fighting when they're
flying in the airplane, when they're doing a routine surgical procedure on you. Sometimes
it's time to fight and sometimes it's time to stop fighting and bond together. Another
example, one of my favorite people I've ever interviewed is Brad Bird of Pixar. Actually,
I gave a version of this talk yesterday at Pixar and rather than saying like I'm saying
to you, that he feeds constructive conflict. I said, "Does he feed constructive conflict?"
And there was actually one of his producers was there and talked about how funny he was
to work with because it was all fighting and all friendly all the time. And, in fact, if
you look at some of the extra material from the Incredible's DVD, you can see a lot of
constructive conflict that he was involved in. So, anyhow, when, when we interviewed
him, Huggy Rao and I, we interviewed him for the McKinsey Quarterly, he described how when
he took a over a movie, a movie some of you may have seen called The Iron Giant, which
was critically reviewed very positively, but didn't do great at the box office, so it was
a sort of like a messed up team. And he said, "I came in the first day and I gave them this
fantastic speech about how we should be arguing with each other all the time and I was gonna
be safe to do it." And like this line, "Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together."
And he said it was one of the best speeches I ever gave because he's sort of that kind
of guy who will be all exuberant. And he said, "Then, they stared at me for three weeks."
[laughter]
"And I'd be like, drawing on the board and asking for help and they'd be," he said, "I
realized that I was teaching a group of abused school children." It was just, like literally,
an abused family. And he said that finally after about three or four weeks, one of them
raised their hand and said, "Brad, I think you're wrong." And he said, "I built on that
little kernel within a couple of months; it was actually pretty much rocking and rolling
and we were arguing." But the reason I like that story is, so, I, as a management professor,
it's very easy to say, "Go have constructive conflict," but if you don't have the trust
to do it, it's not something that's easily accomplished. And I will say that Brad, he
was self-deprecating and funny at the same time. Two quick caveats: Don't fight in the
early stage of idea generation if you're in a brainstorming session. Arguing about the
ideas then it's probably too early and I've already implied this. Whoops. When you're
in the implementation phase, you should probably stop fighting because that's pretty destructive.
And Andy Grove has a pretty good bit of advice here, which is that you should especially
work hard to implement ideas that you think are completely wrong. And the reason he gives
is, that way when it fails, there's now no doubt that it was because it was about a bad
implementation. And I think that's sort of like a cute thing and, and in general, if
you ever, if you're ever in a project with somebody who thinks that you're doing something
that's a bad idea, sometimes they accidently undermine it or maybe on purpose undermine
it constantly. And so I like the Andy Grove sort of argument there. Alright, so the next
one, how am I doing on time? I may, I will probably skip at least one. Let me skip this
one because I want to make sure, so, I'll give you the short version. So, the basic
idea here is another thing and this comes from some work that my colleague, Jeff Pfeffer,
and I did on turning knowledge into action. One of the problems that organizations have
and bosses have when they have trouble with performance issues is when they unwittingly
start rewording smart talk rather than smart action. And so, Jeff and I had been studying
this for a long time. The example of the first management team I studied to sort of abbreviate
it was when I was a brand new full professor and therefore, had so much job security; it
was almost impossible to fire me. I started doing consulting finally; actually didn't
consult until I got too much job security. And the first team I worked with was the top
management team of a Fortune 200 company and I was amazed how they would constantly make
decisions and not implement them. And one of those decisions which they still have not
implemented was to put the name of their product on their product.
[laughter]
So, my colleague, Jeff Pfeffer, and I started realizing that there's some weird times in
organizational life when you get reworded or people will say smart things and not actually
do them. And to sort of skip ahead, how do you overcome it? It turns out that people
who manage the work, who actually understand it, tend to be much more effective. So, it's
one thing I sort of like start thinking about some of the most successful tech organizations.
Well, your founders, you can't argue that they don't understand the technology since
they invented it. Bill Gates is a pretty weird guy, but you can't argue that he doesn't understand
the technology. Larry Ellison's even weirder, but he sure understands his company and then
Steve Jobs probably knows what's going on, too. And you sort of go down the list, it
turns out that managing stuff that you understand, there tends to be less smart talk because
the boss is harder to fool. Oh, and the Bill George story is, when Bill George took over
as CO Medtronic and I, I interviewed him about this, he had never known anything about medical
device companies and he did something that was a lot different, for example, than what
Carly Fiorina did when she took over HP; he spent 75% of his time, the first nine months,
in hospitals, talking to surgeons, watching surgery, talking to procurement officers or
very important medical device industry to understand the work that he was managing.
Another thing is whining; I don't go into that in detail, but whining is pretty destructive
when people turn all their energy to trying to say how everything sucks rather than to
try to make it better. Simple language and simple action, at the same time we got all
the crazy mortgage stuff going on with the banks. You have A. G. Lafley running Proctor
and Gamble and his motto was, "Keep it Sesame Street simple." And if anybody has ever met
A.G. Lafley, he talks to you like you're a seven year old. It's like Mr. Rogers. Remember
those who were kids during Sesame Street? And, and that sort of, and, and it sort of,
Proctor and Gamble was things like the customer is boss or the customer is king, but then
they'd make billion dollar decisions in the basis of a very simple approach. And then
to talk about, well now an easier competitor, an interesting thing, example, of keeping
it simple is to look at what happened when Jobs took over as then acting CEO of Apple
in 1997. And this is actually just a partial list of the hardware they had and so, he would
walk around and he would say, "Well, why would I buy a Performa 5400 rather than 8600?" And
as the quote said, "We couldn't even tell our friends which ones to buy." And one of
the things that Jobs did was in one year, all the hardware was gone that they had just
the year before when they got there and they went to a simple two by two laptop, desktop,
home office. And they still have got a pretty simple product line, actually, if you look
at how much stuff they sell. So, that's an argument for what it takes to turn knowledge
into action. So, I sped through that fast enough. I think we're back on time. The last
two points is something I thought about a lot when I was working on this book, which
is the notion that what the best bosses do, and you can kind of oversimplify this, is
like, where should you spend your time? Eliminating the negative or accentuating the positive?
And the accentuating the positive is probably a lot more fun, but at least if you look at
the evidence, at least as I understand the evidence, you probably should focus on eliminating
the negative first and so, let me talk a little bit about this. So, so, so first off, with
superstars, the question that I like to ask when I look at organizations to figure out
whether or not the bosses breeding the right people or the organization is good at turning
knowledge into action, is I ask, "Who are your superstars?" Like, what would you define
the standard superstar and one thing that Jeff Pfeffer and I figured out after looking
at compensation systems a lot, is that although though vary wildly, so you might have something
like the General Electric compensation system where 80% of the goodies go to the top 20%
pretty consistently or I saw somebody in the back wearing an IDEO t-shirt. So, IDEO was
a company; a design consultancy, an innovation consultancy, I've worked with them a lot.
IDEO has a really socialistic reward system actually, by the standards of many organizations.
But, when we look across organizations that tend to be well managed, the way that they
define superstars are people who not only, if you will, push their individual agenda
ahead, they have others around them succeed. And to give you an example of this, one of
my favorite examples my colleague, Jeff Pfeffer and co-author, he went to Suit's University
for Men's Warehouse. How many of you know what Men's Warehouse is? It's like that guy,
I bet you not many people shop at Men's Warehouse at Google because you don't need to dress
like that.
[laughter]
But, but Men's Warehouse, the idea of Men's Warehouse is, of course, to sell suits to
men who don't want to be there in the first place; that's the basic model. And one of
the things they do in their compensation and norm system is they have sort of a cruel system
where there's one salesperson who is getting the money at the moment, who's getting, who's
getting the incentive, but everybody in the store is expected to help sustain the team
selling environment. And, and they're pretty serious about doing this. As an example, in
their Seattle store, you had one guy who kept stealing sales so they fired him and when
they fired him, the interesting thing is that no individual salesperson reached the same
level of performance, but the store sales went up 30% overall. So, that's a good example,
if you will, getting rid of a rotten apple and that brings me to my next point, which
is that there's a lot of evidence that bad is stronger than good. So, in fact, this is
an academic article that was published in the Psychological Review. That's the title
and the basic argument is that negative events, people and so on pack such app compared to
positive ones, it's unbelievable. And a great one is the research on personal relationships.
It turns out that in marriage, dating relationships, and other personal relationships, that when
things slip below five to one, so for every good interaction, for every bad interaction,
there's less than five good interactions; the chance of divorce, breaking up gets very
high. So, I always remember this in dealing with my wife, which is when I've been bad
I figure I gotta at least make up five times and, and if you look at the research, five
is the minimum. You should really aim for ten. But, but the general point is that, if
you will, bad is stronger than good and some of the best research is actually, This American
Life episode in this you can listen to, was done and reviewed by a guy named Will Felps
and he looked at the group dynamics literature and essentially, showed that different sort
of negative characters, so what I would call ***, deadbeats, depressive people, they
would pretty consistently bring down performance 30 or 40% than if they had just one. And there's
two basic mechanisms that the researchers talk about; about why this happens. The first
one is, is you've got somebody who's really destructive in your group; you basically spend
an inordinate amount of time dealing with the person. So, you're distracted from performance,
that may sound familiar to some of you, and then the second thing is that it's contagious.
Bad behavior is contagious. So, like you catch the evilness. So the argument here is that
although, if you will, eliminating the negative is not as much fun as accentuating the positive.
If you're a boss, you might want to deal with, if you will, the problems and the *** first
because that's where you can have the biggest impact. So, let me take, give me five more
minutes, so I'll got through my last points pretty quickly and then we can have some time
for discussion. So, the final point is if you look at a lot of different studies, especially
more survey oriented studies and you ask whether the characteristics of a good boss, somebody's
committed to, that who they work hard for and is unlikely to quit or would want to work
for again, things like that. One of the characteristics that comes back over and over again is this
notion that my boss has my back. My boss will protect me. And so this notion is the best
bosses protect their people from harm, all sorts of idiocy. I can tell you a story I
heard from Pixar just yesterday because it's better than any of mine. I'll go through whatever
ones I have. So, I, I gave this example and there was one guy afterwards and he told me
worked for Pixar 28 years. I didn't even realize it was that old. So, so I guess you have a
club at Pixar for people who have been there for more than half their lives and he was
the first member that, and he described how when Pixar was part of Lucas Entertainment
and some of you may know the story. It's a pretty good story, which was that Pixar, which
was still trying to make animated movies, but being forced to do other things as well.
It was part of the Lucas Empire, but then Lucas had a messy divorce so Jobs bought it
for a song; bought it for 10 million dollars from George Lucas. But, before this happened,
there was a bunch of financial problems and Ed Catmull and then there's a guy named Alvy
Ray Smith, and if you don't know Alvy Ray Smith, it's like look at your Silicon Valley
history; amazing guy at Xerox Park who was the main person who invented the technology
that made 3D animation possible and he actually got fired by Xerox Park. In fact, he was never
hired officially. He was a piece of equipment that was rented; that's how they got him in
through their accounting system. Anyhow, so there was an efficiency guy who wanted to
cut costs at Pixar, it, it. I heard this from this guy, and there's a couple other folks
who have been around a long time just yesterday and they kept saying to, especially Ed Catmull
to Alby Ray Smith, where's the list of people we've gotta lay off? And they'd say, "Oh,
we'll give it to you tomorrow. We'll give it to you tomorrow.." So finally, they gave
up and gave him the list and there were two names on the list: Ed Catmull and Alby Ray
[laughter]
And that story, which they tell over and over again at Pixar, that's a sign that those guys
have their backs and, by the way, they didn't do any layoffs and a little bit later, Jobs
bought it for 10 million dollars. But to me, that's a better story than any one I can tell
you and so I'll just sort of like zip ahead. Some about more minor ways that a good boss
might do it, like by seeing visitors so you can get your work done, making meetings short.
My colleague, Jeff Pfeffer, who writes about power and politics, will tell you if you want
to get ahead and push people around and be known as powerful, you might start meetings
late; hold people a little bit later to show that you're so important that whatever they're
doing next isn't so important. But, if you actually cared about their efficiency you
might keep the meetings shorter and if you will cancel, cancel them on time or end them
on time when possible. And then the other thing, and I'll tell this one quickly because
I think it's fun, is, and I guess the Alby Ray Smith and Ed Catmull falls in this, too,
one of the things that good bosses do in any large bureaucracy there ends up being some
idiocy from on high and part of your job as a boss is to protect your people from idiocy
from on high. And my favorite example of this was in, this was so long ago, like 1986. I
just moved back from California, I did my dissertation on organizational death in Michigan,
the process in which organizations are unwound. And I read that a large bank was closing 125
branches and I contacted them immediately because I thought I could do a quantitative
study of the closing process and I met these guys in San Francisco at the RAT Patrol, the
Retail Action Team, who were overseeing the process and what they did was to get to know
me, they gave me four closings to study, four that went well, in terms of business cap and
four that went badly. And I did these little case studies and the pattern was amazing.
In the bad closings, the story was all the same. They'd say the secret to our success
was that we ignored the procedures from the Retail Action Team. And I remember still in
San Jose and a branch manager took out this big, fat book that had been put together by
the Retail Action Team, and he said, "The secret to my success was I ignored everything
in this book."
[laughter]
Then, I went to the bank closings and their story was like the opposite. They said, "The
reason we had so much trouble and we're so frustrated is we tried to follow these procedures
and it wasn't possible." And then, for those of you who are probably more experienced now
than I was then, as you would predict, when I pre-, when I presented these findings to
the Retail Action Teams, I was shown the door so quickly it was unbelievable and never heard
from them again. So, that's the point of having employees backs and let me make one more quick
comment. And then hopefully have a few minutes for questions and comments. This is a study
that isn't particularly new, but I think is still one of the most important ones I know.
If you're going to be a boss and be in tune with your people, maybe the most important
single thing for you to think about and understand is after the people you lead interact with
you, they have more or less energy. And where this little insight comes from, one of these
incredibly simple studies, which actually started out at McKinsey, there's a guy named
Rob Cross who was working there when he did it and now he's said it in 50 or 60 different
firms. And what he keeps finding over and over again is although he look at a bunch
of different variables, and he's a social network analyst, one of the main things that
predict whether or not a manager, in particular, gets a positive performance evaluation, gets
promoted and in particular surrounded with high, hard-working, high performing, innovative
people is just the simple answer to that question. After you talk to this person, do you have
more or less energy? And, and I think the important footnote here is this is not an
argument for charisma, in fact, one of the things that Rob really emphasizes is it's
not about being charismatic or even emotionally positive; it's more about having faith and
trust from people than anything else. OK, so, I, I've sort of made it on time with a
little bit of rushing, so comments or questions now that we're sort of at five to one? Reactions?
>>audience member #2: So what about employees that need to vent sometimes? People just need
to vent because there's really frustrating stuff and I at least wanna get it out. But,
it has the potential of creating a, making a negative environment that is taken wrong
and is that something that, how does...
>>Sutton: So, so that's an interesting question. So, so, in general, and there's constant ***
that ends up being negative that comes along. And this is about 15 years ago I did in ethnography
at IDEO, and I, I heard this great statement from this guy because I was like, "Why are
you ***?" He was actually *** about my friend and the founder, David Kelly. And
I said, "Why are you *** about David? He's such a great guy." And he looks at me
and he goes, "Oh, it isn't real complaining, it's just recreational ***."
[laughter]
And, and I think that's a pretty useful concept because there's a difference between just
little whining what we all do in life, versus the stuff that's like real vindictiveness.
The, the other thing that I would say that's also important beyond that little recreational
*** point, is, is that, is that there, that your bosses and other people in the organization
need to be tolerant when you're actually pointing out flaws. And, and there's a difference between
whining and not being constructive and saying, "That's wrong. You need to fix it or things
are gonna be screwed up." And people who do that are very important in organizations that
don't treat such people with proper respects have all sorts of problems. For example, when
there are hospitals and they don't treat people who do that with the right respect, they kill
more people. So, so it's an important ability as long as it's not just destructive whining
that spreads like poison. But I, I think there's a balance there. Yes. Hi!
>>audience member #3: Hi. How can employees help their bosses or their managers develop
good habits?
>>Sutton: Oh! Oh, I love that. So, it, well first of all, I love that question because
it's, it's not all of like the bosses responsibility. It's partly your responsibility to people
that you lead. How can they help them, their habits? I guess the first thing that, that
comes to me, that comes to mind is if I'm managing my boss, is that I want to try to
figure out where my bosses are emotionally and I actually, you heard a great example.
There's a friend of mine just took a job at another university, he interviewed the Dean
and he asked the Dean, he said, "I wanna know all your personal quirks and I wanna know
the things I can do to help you be more successful." And then, and then, the other thing that I
guess that I would say and I don't always do this right is that I think it's important
to figure when and where to criticize your boss, so try to avoid embarrassing them in
public. And hopefully, you have the kind of boss that you can take aside and sort of beat
up a little bit in private. But, I've, I think that's a good topic, in fact, it's one of
the things I've tried, I may even do the book after next time. The question is like, how
you help a manager, or manage your boss because the boss can't do everything. They need help
with what they're doing. So, that's a great topic.
[pause]
>>Cliff: Do we have, is there any kind of questions?
Cool. With that being said, thank you Dr. Sutton and thanks guys.
>>Sutton: Thanks, Cliff! Thank you guys, you guys are great. Thank you. Thank you.
[applause]