Apparently, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States said that. I like that quote because, while so much writing, research, and advice focuses on what leaders say and do (which is right), sometimes people forget that the measure of a leader is found in how he or she affects others, and Adams makes the point so well.

I encountered this quote in an "inspirational" slide deck with music called "Are You A Leader," which was apparently done by a company called Signature. A reader named Matt was kind enough to point me to it, suggesting I might like it.  I did like a lot of the quotes in it and it was well done, although it is a little too pretty and uncritical for my tastes, but that probably says more about my personality than the quality of the deck -- which was clearly done with much thought and care.

I opened that The New York Times Books section yesterday, and there it was: Chip and Dan Heath's new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard was Number 1 on the "Advice" list (a list that is usually harder to get on than thr Nonfiction list).  My reaction was "Holly Cow," or as as I wrote Chip, it was really "Holly Shit."   Number 1!  This is their second New York Times bestseller and second masterpiece in a row following the now classic Made to Stick.  I read a pre-publication version not because Chip and Dan sent it to me, but because my wife Marina Park -- CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts -- got a copy (along with thousands of other people like her in positions to bring about change). This is not only a brilliant marketing strategy, it means that the ideas are spread and will be used by people in positions to do the most good.   As you can see from Marina's  blog post, she found the book to be extremely useful in thinking about both her role and other social problems.

A toast to the Heath Brothers, two guys who have woven together evidence-based ideas and great stories to write two of the most useful books of our era.  Indeed, many authors write about things they can do well themselves, but these guys not only write about ideas that spread and stick, and how to make change happen, they demonstrate their working knowledge of these topics by implementing  brilliant marketing strategies.  And on top of that, they are two of the nicest guys around.

I was rather shocked, and quite delighted, to get an email from Katie Clark at IDEO yesterday with several different new graphics for the top of my blog.  I didn't ask her or talk to her about, she just decided to send me some new ones because she and her colleagues at IDEO were looking at my blog and decided to try some new designs.  I feel mighty lucky to have friends who are world class designers and decide on a whim to give me presents like that.  Thanks Katie!

The new design above is the one I like best.  In the IDEO and d.school spirit, this is a prototype and I can always go back to the old design or perhaps see if you like one of the other one's better.  For starters, what do you think of the new design above?

P.S. I would also like to give a big thank you to Tim Keely for inserting the new graphic.

I have written here fairly often about research by Harvard Business School's Boris Groysberg on the virtues and limits of star employees.  One of my posts described has delightful research that shows firms should steal superstar women, not men.  It turns out that when star men move to another firm, they tend to do a lot worse in the new setting.  In contrast, star women tend to sustain their performance when they go to another firm.  Groysberg suggests this difference is explained because women are more skilled at establishing new relationships and less likely to engage in dysfunctional internal competition in their new firms.

Boris's new research is equally fascinating, a while back, he sent me an article he wrote with two colleagues called called "Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth" (see complete reference below). They studied over 6000 industry analysts from 246 research departments in Wall Street firms -- these are people who write reports about the current and expected performance of firms, and who specializes in particular industries. Their reports predict future earnings for companies and contain recommendations about whether to buy or sell stocks.  As Boris and his colleagues show, some of these analysts are stars, selected by the Institutional Investor as being the top person in their industry and being picked as a star is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation.  The results of this research are interesting because, while some leaders might think that there is no such thing as having too many stars, Boris and his colleagues found a curvilinear relationship between the number of stars in a group and overall performance -- so, having a few stars help, have a few more doesn't hurt (but doesn't help), but groups reach a tipping point where too many stars seem to dampen performance. 

Groysberg and his colleagues suggest that the "too many cooks" problem happens because partly because, when a group is filled with individual stars, the dynamics degenerate because people devote excessive attention to the the internal status game and competition and hesitate to share information that may help the group as a whole, but will threaten their standing in the group.  In other words, when there are too many stars, people focus on what is best for themselves, see other top performers as people who are in the way rather than people they should help, and the overall performance of the team seems less important.

This is just one study, but a quite rigorous one one.  And it adds for evidence to the claim that Jeff Pfeffer made in the The Knowing-Doing Gap that dysfunctional internal competition is one of the most vile impediments to turning knowledge into action in groups and organizations.  Once the game becomes "I win when you lose," the team or organization suffers.

Here is the complete reference: Groysberg, Boris, Jeffrey T. Polzer, and Hillary Anger Elfenbein. "Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth: How High Status Individuals Decrease Group Effectiveness." Organization Science (forthcoming). 

This Wednesday, March 3rd, we are holding a special section of my class on Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach.  Class will be held in an auditorium at Stanford, at Gates B01.  Our guest star for the day is IDEO Partner and head of marketing, Whitney Mortimer (pictured to the left). I have invited Whitney because our class is currently studying how to build and sustain a culture of innovation, and IDEO is the poster child for this feat.   \

I've know Whitney more than 10 years and she has often been a guest in this class.  In general, she has refrained from being a public face who represents this great company, leaving that to others like the amazing Tim Brown and David Kelley.  But whenever I hear Whitney talk about IDEO, I always see them from a different and compelling vantage point, as her perspective on the links among IDEO's culture, strategy, brand, and history is unique, despite all that has been said and written about this great company and its leaders.

This event is open to the public, but there are a few details and constraints.  First, pizza and soft drinks will be served right outside the classroom from about noon to 12:25.  Then Whitney's talk will commence from 12:30 to 1:30.  Because the room only holds about 200 people (and we will occupy perhaps 100 seats with our students and some other guests) we only have room for about 100 guests.  In addition, we need to know how much pizza to order. So, if you are going to join us, please send and rsvp to Carol XU, her email is jxcarol2001[at]gmail[dot]com.

Also note that we are "closing" the invitation at 9AM on Weds. morning or when we are sold out, whatever comes first. We hope to see you there, it should be great fun, and it is a fun chance to learn about the history of one of the greatest and most civilized companies I know, and from a perspective that is a bit different than is usually told.

An editor at Psychology Today, where I am now blogging, wrote and asked for some ideas her might use in the print edition. His question was "What's the worst advice you've ever received (Or just some really bad advice ...).   I wrote him that I had received -- and given -- so much bad advice, that I couldn't pick a "worst," but told this story. 

Here is one -- with two pieces of bad advice.  When I was working on marketing my last book, The No Asshole Rule, I first had a publisher offer me a contract, but they insisted that I had to change the title --- in part -- because people wouldn't buy a book with that mild obscenity in the title.  I told them that I wouldn't consider an offer unless they went with the title and walked.  Then, as I was working on marketing the book in the months prior to publication a fellow with more than 25 years experience in the book industry insisted that I was nuts to send copies of the book to perhaps 100 bloggers (most of whom I knew because I am a blogger too) and to see if they might write something about the book months before it was published.  He insisted that trying to sell a book before it was available was waste of time and effort.  I believe that, in addition to the ideas in the book, that the main two reasons that the book became a New York Times bestseller are because of the title, which no one ever seems to forget, even when they hate it.  The second reason is that the buzz on the web created a lot of Amazon pre-orders, which helped the book become the #1 Non-fiction bestseller for much of the first week it was out and one of the top 5 business books for several weeks (it was ultimately the #8 business book for 2007).  When the book first came out, the major bookstores had done modest pre-orders and I had only a couple of stories in the media.  The Amazon numbers (created by pre-publication buzz) led the major bookstores to put in big orders and led the media to do many stories on the book. 

One of my mottos in life (which I first heard from a Stanford undergraduate years ago named Kathy) is "Don't believe everythingt hey tell you"  This is especially true if they add something like "I have been in the business for 25 years and I know what I am talking about."  As one of my former students, Andy Hargadon used to say in response to this line, "Do you have 25 years of experience, or have you experienced the same year 25 times?"

I wonder, dear readers, what your answer to this question might be, what is the worst advice you have ever received?

There is saying, kind of a crude little formula, I have been using for years when I write and give talks on what it takes to build a culture where people innovate routinely (which I think I stole from Charles O'Reilly at the Stanford Business School):

Creativity + implementation = innovation

I have always found it a useful oversimplification of the two big things that have to happen in order to innovate, to cash in on new ideas.  It is also related to one of the main ideas in Weird Ideas That Work, that creativity is about increasing the amount of variation and all around messiness and routine work is about driving out variance and driving in order and predictability.  

In this spirit, one of the student groups in my class on Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach, did a fantastic case study of the culture of innovation at Lunar Design. The members were Ioannis Alivizatos, Meeta Arora, Stephen Streeter, and Ben Merrick.  They heard the quote in the title of this post from John Edson (pictured to the left), Lunar product design firm that has designed many familiar products including the HP Touchsmart, the Oral B CrossAction toothbrush, and the Modu phone.  I think that "“From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit” conveys a similar message to the one I borrowed from Charles – that the messiness and failure required to generate a new idea needs to be shut-off as you move into the implementation phase, where more control and order are required.  Knowing how and when to make that shift is tough, although the best firms and bosses make it happen routinely.  For example, Intel’s motto “disagree and then commit” reflects this spirit – you fight during the creative part, but join arms to make the idea work during the implementation part, even if you think the decision was wrong.

P.S. And following my last post on failure, I also liked how a key element of their culture was that, when people made mistakes, they framed it as "Paying for education."

As I emphasize on my list to left of 15 Things That I Believe, one of the best diagnostic to assess whether an organization is effective or innovative is "What Happens When Someone Makes a Mistake?" I made that this argument one way or another in every book I have every written and perhaps 50% of the speeches I have made in the past decade.  As I say in the above link (which is a story about Amazon, an organization that continually impresses me with its learning culture):

"Failure will never be eliminated, and so the best we can hope for from human beings and organizations is that they learn from their mistakes, that rather than making the same mistakes over and over again, they make new and different mistakes.

The upshot for Jeff Pfeffer and me is that, perhaps the single best diagnostic to see if an organization is innovating, learning, and capable of turning knowledge into action is “What happens when they make a mistake?” Stealing some ideas from research on medical errors, leaders and teams can “forgive and forget,” which may be temporarily comforting, but condemns people and systems to make the same mistakes over and over again – in the case of hospitals, this means you bury the dead (or close the incision) and don’t talk about it.  Or you can remember who made mistakes, chase them down, humiliate them, and thus create climate of fear. In such situations, the game becomes avoiding the finger of blame rather than surfacing, understanding, and fixing mistakes (see Harvard’s Amy Edmondson’s wonderful research on drug treatment errors for evidence on this point).  Or you can Forgive and Remember, which is not only the title of a great book by Charles Bosk, it is the philosophy that the best teams and organizations use. You forgive because it is impossible to run an organization without making mistakes, and pointing fingers and holding grudges creates a climate of fear. You remember – and talk about the mistakes openly –so people and the system can learn. And you remember so that, even though you have tried to retrain people and teach them, if some people keep making the same mistakes over and over again, then, well, they need to be moved to another kind of job."

The connection to The No Asshole Rule, however, was made clear in a most thoughtful blog post from Peter Seebach in response to the book.  I was especially taken by this paragraph about his workplace:

I don’t think we explicitly have a “no-asshole” rule; if we do, I’ve not been told of it. We do, however, have a corporate culture which undermines the things that are essential for bullying. There’s a total lack of interest in blame, so far as I can tell. People certainly can, and do, try to figure out how something went wrong — but not for the purpose of assigning blame, just for the purpose of fixing it. No one expects that people won’t make mistakes, or yells at them for making mistakes. As a result, people are more comfortable than they might otherwise be coming forward with information about problems which were caused by their mistakes. Net result: Less time trying to shift blame, less time before the problem is fixed.

Now that sounds like a functional workplace.. a nearly perfect example of how "forgive and remember" ought to work. And the link to rule is splendid. 

A reader named Kevin just wrote and told me a great story:

A good friend of mine in college was at a busy nightclub, on the crowded dance floor, dancing with his girlfriend.  It was very crowded, to the point where you could barely dance and in close proximity to everyone around you.  He overheard a guy that was “hitting” on a girl.  He had been drinking and was pretty obnoxious.  He told the girl that he very much wanted to get” into her pants”.  Her response was “sorry buddy, there is already one asshole in these pants, and no room for another”.  The guy was immediately defused and left the dance floor with his tail between his legs, and no longer bothered anyone at the nightclub.  Thought you might get a chuckle from this brilliant comeback.

Is it true? I don't know and don't care, it is the best asshole put-down story I've heard in a long time.  Another great story came from Tina a few years back on an funny moment in her MBA class -- and that one is better documented than the tale above.

I love my university, I've been treated far better than I deserve during my 25 plus years at Stanford.  But as much a I love it, I wonder if it is time for us to run something like a "stupid rules contest" here.  I once met the CEO of a large bank in New England who explained to me how they had made things much better by running such a contest and taking the suggestions seriously. For example, they got rid of a rule that people waiting outside a branch could not be let in until official opening time.  They changed things so, if it was 10 or 15 minutes before opening time and, say, people were waiting outside in the cold, employees could open the door and let them wait in the warm lobby.

I don't want to mention any specific rules at Stanford, as I don't want to point fingers at any group or person.  But although no doubt each was developed and implemented with the best of intentions, it seems to me that they accumulate like barnacles on a ship, with one after another being added.  Each one slows down the process of teaching and research, and the old ones never seem to be removed.

Perhaps a stupid rules contest here would help. I admire Stanford's leaders, so this is not meant to be an attack on any individual, I just think it is something that happens to organizations over time, and I wonder if it would be a good time to haul our organizational ship into the dry dock and scrape off some of those old barnacles -- and perhaps some new ones we have grown to that make things harder to do than need be. 

One of the most lively discussions we've had on this blog was around a post I wrote a couple years ago called Performance Evaluations: Do They Do More Harm Than Good.  The reason, I argued, is that that they are done  badly in most places that the best performance evaluation might be no performance evaluation at all. In too many places, they are done by badly trained people, the forms and procedure  often have little relevance to the people being evaluated or to organizational goals, they take a huge hunk of time (a bad 360 degree evaluation can waste weeks), and often leave both the evaluator and the person being evaluated feeling less rather than more motivated. As I said in my earlier post,the famous quality guru W. Edwards Deming was vehemently opposed to using them at all.  As Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote on page 193 of The Knowing-Doing Gap:

Deming emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing good work. He argued that these systems require leaders to label many people as poor performers even though their work is well within the range of high quality. Deming maintained that when people get unfair negative evaluations, it can leave them "bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of the rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior."  

To Deming's point, there is one organization I work with -- a high tech firm with about 250 employees -- that eliminated formal reviews except when people are being considered for a promotion or when they are having serious performance problems and need to "on plan" (i.e., shape up or be fired). They have about ten different levels in the organization, and everyone at the same level gets the same pay and same sized bonus.  And they have been emphasizing frequent and lower stakes feedback instead.  So I know of at least one place that is having some success breaking from this often hollow and destructive ritual.

 If you want to read the most compelling and complete case against the traditional performance evaluation, however,I suggest that you pre-order UCLA Professor Sam Culbert's new book Get Rid of the Performance Review. He first made this argument in the Wall Street Journal, but the book digs into this argument in far more detail and offers solutions for managers and companies who want to replace the traditional review -- or at least reduce the damage that they do.  To help spread the word about the book, and to find out if as many people despise the performance review as Sam (and I) believe, he has -- a bit like the ARSE -- designed a ten-item test called How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews?  I just took it and scored a 36, which means I really hate them.  

Take the test and let me know what you think, and after you complete it, you can read the first chapter of the book.  I predict that this book is going to spark a lot of controversy and, I hope, inspire leaders and organizations to use performance evaluations less, and to do a better of using them.  At least I hope so.

Here is the first question to give you a taste:

1- My favorite performance review was:

a. when my boss correctly identified weaknesses that I was eager to work on.

b.when I was reviewed, anonymously, by many insightful colleagues I interact with, including some who want my job.

   
c. when my boss asked me to first review myself, allowing the boss to correct my silly self impressions.

d. when my boss forgot to give me one

I just got an email (it took them just a couple hours) from the Urban Dictionary that our definition of Passhole as ""someone who opts out of participating in a decision, but then complains bitterly about the outcome." has been accepted."  BUT -- and I should have looked before -- Passhole is already there, with 14 different definitions of the word, most having to do with driving.  The top rated one is:

The idiot drivers that move steadily along, but suddenly increase speed when they wake up and realize you are passing them. If they succeed in blocking your opportunity to pass, they will immediately resume the former, annoying pace. If you pass them successfully, they will ride your bumper for a short time before returning to la-la land.

Our definition will appear in a couple days. When it does, please get in there and vote for it early and often!

Thanks again, that was fun.

Or, in the words of Steve Jobs, the journey was the reward in this case.  As most readers will recall, this all started as a little contest in response to Mozilla's Asa Dotzler: Let's Invent a New Word or Phrase: What do you call someone who "opts out of participating in something but then complains about the outcome."  I have been overwhelmed by the number of suggestions, and even more than that, the quality and complexity of the conversation about the various candidates.  At the moment, there are a combined 80 comments on the post above and the follow-up post that listed the "finalists."   My reading of the votes is that -- although not everyone liked it --  passhole got the most votes.

I just submitted Passhole to the Urban Dictionary  as a new word.  I changed the definition just slightly to  "someone who opts out of participating in a decision, but then complains bitterly about the outcome."

In order to honor some of the other suggestions (I apologize if yours didn't make it, I picked them based on my biases, but of course, other will have different preferences), I added the following words to the list of synonyms and related words and phrases that ask for: passive-aggressive, Monday morning sniveler, detached dissident, douchenag, sour grapers, unconscientious objector, inverted  cheerleader, submarine, seagull, weenie-whiner, whampire, free-griper. I have never submitted anything to the Urban Dictionary, but I felt compelled given your remarkably thoughtful suggestions and comments. I understand that they reject a lot of submissions -- I will let you know how it turns out. Once again, I can't thank everyone enough for making so many comments, and make such thoughtful comments.

Indeed, as much as I love the fun of the names and all that, I was even more taken with the wonderful conversation about the dangers of labeling people passholes. Many smart comments were made, and although labeling people has advantages ( I would argue, for example, that openly talking about norms against assholes or passholes, and calling others or yourself when you violate those norms, are signs of a healthy culture), nonetheless, multiple commentors did a lovely job is calling out the risks of the label. Note these comments in particular, as I think they are especially wise:

Bob G. makes a great case that labeling people as passholes can, at times, be a case of blaming the victim:

If an organization finds itself populated with large numbers of the "non-participating disgruntled," perhaps a little self-examination is in order. Are they really all just a bunch of worthless whiners? Or is it *possible* that the organization has somehow attracted them, or even created them? Is this, in fact, a symptom of an asshole environment, rather than simple flawed characters? People who have been ignored, abused, and had their ideas twisted and/or stolen are easily dismissed as having a "bad attitude." Do not blame the victims, folks. This is a complex and nuanced problem.

Dave described such an asshole environment:

I think you are all jumping on the trashing bandwagon a little too fast. I happen to work in one of those very toxic environments where you are pretty much discouraged to contribute, when you do contribute, your feedback is pretty much disregarded and the administration does what they want anyways (meaning they "pretend" to want feedback, but only go through the motions), and very often decisions made do go down south, affecting those of us on the frontlines. So yes, after a while, those like us who actually care just stop giving the feedback or saying anything... I refuse to take the blame for asshats who make bad decisions in spite of getting good advice (ie they choose to ignore the good advice). So, you know, lay off a bit. It is not always as simple as you think.

Thomas raised an important concern about the labeling that really made me think:

What's the net effect of an exercise in this sort of "personality branding". Let's come up with a name for the sorts of people that annoy "us". Let's come up with something mean to call "them". What's up with that, Bob?

And I thought that CV Harquail did a great job of wrapping things-up:

I've gotten a kick out of the suggested names, but I have to chime in to support of Thomas's concern about the 'branding' of a person by applying such a label.There are several important and serious concern about labeling a person -- one of which is that depersonalizes them and makes them all about the behavior, not about who they are in toto.Plus, as Maren pointed out, once we attach a label to the behavior/person, it can lead us to "complain about the complainers" and let ourselves off the hook for acting to fix it.

So, let's find a good (and funny!) name to capture this dysfunctional behavior *and* also figure out a generous, positive way to respond to it when we see folks trying it.

I put C.V's comment in bold, because, after going through this exercise -- which was more involved and educational than I ever imagined at the outset -- that is pretty much where I stand.  For me, the upshot of all this is that organizations and leaders have a responsibility to remove obstacles to authentic participation and when they find that -- after decision has been made -- passholes surface and start torpedoing the decision, they should look in the mirror before blaming them.  On the other hand, a well-functioning team or organization will stop this kind of behavior in its tracks and in particular leaders will model the right behavior -- which includes resisting the temptation to be a passhole even though they have the power to do so and calling out their own sins when they act like one. 

Once again, a big thanks to all of you for individual and collective wisdom.

I am both delighted and overwhelmed by the deluge of smart and often responses to my  last post: Let's Invent a New Word or Phrase: What do you call someone who "opts out of participating in something but then complains about the outcome. You made 57 comments -- by far a record for any Work Matters post and C.V. Harquail put up a related and quite inspiring conversation with Maren, one of her readers that i found very thoughtful.  As you may recall, this was all sparked by an email from Mozilla's Asa Doztler, who asked the question.  There are about 100 suggestions in the various comments and so many are wonderful, that is isn't easy to pick the best.  So how about this. I will pick some I especially liked.  Please let me know what your favorite is, or if you prefer another, and we will see what Asa and his colleagues prefer as well. Here are nine and I pasted in text when people offered it. 

Lazy Bee. Instead of being a busy bee who helps everyone out and brings in honey, this is a bee who doesn't help out the group but reserves the right to sting you once the work is done.

Passhole.  Describes someone who passes on the opportunity to contribute to an idea, then criticizes what others come up with. Also appropriate for a driver in the right lane who speeds up and recklessly cuts in front of you

Unconscientious objector

"Inverted cheerleaders" comes to my mind; goes with the people who suffer from rectal-cranial inversion syndrome.

Submarines: They stay at depth until the last minute (when you are about to ship a product or are trying to pass a final milestone) and then pop up and torpedo (obviously with no constructive criticism either).

Seagull: A "seagull contributor", like a seagull manager, usually holds themselves above and beyond the fray, but sporadically swoop down to steal your french fries and crap on everything.

Weenie-whiner

Whampire: someone who whines while feeding off the energies of the living. Someone who whines while feeding off the energies of the living.

Free-griper: captures both the free-riding and the kvetching...

What is your favorite?  Which one did I leave out that you liked even better?  Any more suggestions?

This question came in an email yesterday from Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, who is renowned for his skill as an open-source marketer, especially in spreading the Firefox browser.  The engine that propels any open source community is having a wide range of smart and hardworking people who generate and refine solutions, and are eager to step in and fix them when things go wrong.  So maintaining norms that encourage people to participate in generating solutions and making decisions-- rather than those who don't pitch in or help make decisions but always complain bitterly about the outcome  -- is crucial to any open source community. 

I would add that the same goes for life inside organizations: Some people refuse to speak-up or pitch-in when ideas are being developed, are unable or unwilling to go to key meetings, and generally don't have the will, time, or inclination to help their colleagues, but then repeatedly shoot-down the decisions that are made, refuse to help implement them, and bad mouth their more hardworking colleagues.  They are destructive assholes in my book.  Indeed, as Jeff Pfeffer and I showed in The Knowing-Doing Gap, there are some organizations where people seem to get rewarded and promoted for shooting down other people and their ideas --- not for generating, proposing, and implementing ideas.  At one large bank we studied, we saw and were told about episode after episode where people who proposed new ideas were ripped to pieces. The people who got ahead in the organization had learned it was career suicide to actually develop and push ideas -- the rewards were all given to critics who not only took down the new ideas, but also took down people who developed and proposed them.

To return to Asa and his friends at Mozilla, they want to discourage this kind of behavior (and so do people in a lot of other workplaces), and are trying to come-up with a punchy, sticky, and fun word to describe these destructive characters.  Here is what Asa wrote me:

A few of us at the office today realized that we didn't have a good word for someone who opts out of participating in something but then complains about the outcome. The most obvious example is someone who doesn't vote and then laments the election results. Ideally this word wouldn't be specific to simply expressing a preference (as in voting) because we'd like it to also include people who, given the opportunity to participate in something much more involved (say, stopping global warming,) fail to take advantage that offer and then complain about the results.  

We came up with a few multi-hyphenated phrases, what I'm calling the "German" approach, but it sure would be nice to have a single, short, and at least somewhat derogatory sounding term for this kind of person.  If you know of an existing English word, or care to help by making one up, we'd love to hear from you.

 

We'll also definitely credit any new word to the creator if we manage to push a that new word into popular use.

I can't come up with anything good.  Terms like "lazy complainers," "destructive second-guessers," and "listless lamenters" don't cut it.  In the spirit of the open source movement, I asked Asa if I could put this out here and see if the readers of Work Matters could come up with something better. We would love to see your ideas. Language is a powerful thing, and it would be great to have powerful word to describe this destructive behavior and/or the people who do it again and again.

I have argued in the past that there are a lot of evidence-based disadvantages to working in an open office, as there are many more interruptions, distractions, and other stressors --- and of course less privacy.  And there are quite a few studies that show when people move from closed to open office designs, they don't like it all and their productivity sometimes drops.  I had an experience a few weeks back, however, that has me questioning the limits of this research -- and believing that if an organization has the right norms, leadership, and especially collective trust  (and have the right people and right skills to truly do cooperative work), that open offices can be a splendid thing. 

This all struck me a few weeks back when I went to visit  David Kelley at IDEO to chat about some ideas we were hatching for the Stanford d.school (which David, a Stanford professor, co-founded along with IDEO... David was the strongest driving force behind both ventures).  I had the usual delightful conversation with IDEO's receptionist (Joanie was working that afternoon) and went upstairs to what is best described as IDEO's "management floor," where IDEO's CFO, head of marketing, Chairman (David Kelley), General Manager (Tom Kelley), and CEO (Tim Brown) all work.  As I turned the corner to the main floor, sitting right where the receptionist on the floor would sit (if they had one, they don't) was none other than CEO Tim Brown.  I frankly took a double-take, as (in many organizations) he was sitting in just the place that would be reserved for an assistant, and frankly, would be seen as one of the lowest status places to sit because of the constant interruptions and because there was no gatekeeper to keep colleagues and random visitors like me from walking-up and talking to him.  I assumed this was a mistake or something, but became more puzzled when I realized that there was some stray group (including Chris Flink, head of  IDEO's New York office) in what I thought was Tim's office.  After I met with David (who was charming and fun as always), I saw that Tim was still there, and I asked him why he wasn't in his office. He said it wasn't his office any longer and that he had moved to what I would call the "receptionist's position," which made him -- as he later explained it -- "the most public person on the floor."

I called him a week or so later to ask more about this approach. He told me that most of IDEO's senior people had moved out of their offices and now when there was a need for more private conversations, there were a lot of small conference available (i.e., their old offices) that everyone could use.  He then explained that after working for IDEO for many years -- including as head of their London and San Francisco offices -- after he became CEO five or six years ago and was given his own office (albeit a pretty small one with glass that limited his privacy) he found it "vaguely embarrassing and frustrating to be in an office." After awhile, he and others moved to a different approach, where they were out in the open and there was more casual and exchange and fewer barriers.  I also asked Tim what happens when visits IDEO's other offices -- at places like London, Chicago, New York, Shanghai, and San Francisco. He said that -- although he spends time in conference rooms in meetings with IDEO people and clients (especially when confidential matters are discussed), he takes a desk in the middle of the action because "When I am there to visit and get to know the people and how they work, I can't learn much sitting in a private office."  

We also had a conversation about what he does when he needs a quite place to work, after all, he did write a great book last year called Change By Design.  He said that he has plenty of quiet time to think, especially when he travels, and that to write a book, well that was something that he did at home on nights and weekends!

To me, the upshot of all this is NOT everyone should move to an open office and every CEO should be in the middle of the social swarm like Tim.   Rather, the lesson is that what Tim and other senior people at IDEO do works when you have the right kind of culture and leadership, when the work requires interdependence and knowledge sharing, and people have developed the right skills and routines to work effectively when they are out in the open and on display to everyone else.  I think it is especially important to develop strong norms around courtesy, about how loud to talk, when to avoid interrupting others, and so on, and to make it safe for anyone in the setting to gently remind others when they are violating such norms.  I have noticed, for example, that it took some years to develop these kinds of norms at the Stanford d.school (the one "open place" that I work at a fair amount), and we are now -- on the whole -- quite considerate and respectful. The great thing about IDEO, of course, is that they have the kind of culture and skilled people who can make openness work.

P.S. In fact, if you are interested in Tim's perspective on the kind of people they strive to hire and develop, check out this recent interview that Morten Hansen (of Collaboration fame) did with Tim Brown on "T-Shaped People."

I got a comment this morning about the outcome of the the appeal meeting at Ohio University for Bill Reader's tenure case.  You may recall that I wrote about this in detail in my post on The No Asshole Rule Versus Compassion for the Mentally Ill. The meeting appears to have been an ugly scene.  According to the report in the school paper:

"A standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty members in Baker University Center 219 heard Dean Greg Shepherd and Director Tom Hodson defend their decision to deny Reader tenure, calling him a non-collegial bully incapable of working with current tenured faculty."

Reader and his supporters offered a much different perspective:

Reader painted a drastically different picture in which professional jealousy and personal disagreements motivated Hodson and three tenured professors to conspire to ruin his career.

Toward the end of the nearly three-hour hearing, Assistant Dean Eddith Dashiell said she's considered the school a "hostile work environment" since 1997.

"The school of journalism has had a history of bullying," Dashiell said, adding that the behavior of the school's tenured faculty during her 18 years in Athens has made her feel threatened and uncomfortable.

It is impossible to know the truth based on the facts in this report.  But it is possible for all of us to take this as a cautionary tale.  When you as a boss let things fester and don't deal with "asshole problems," be it among a single colleague or many of them, you risk having things degenerate into a a total mess like this one.  When everyone starts calling everyone else an asshole, as is happening here, then it is a sign to me of an asshole infested place.  As I wrote in The No Asshole Rule, when you are embedded in such a situation, it is very difficult to avoid becoming an asshole both because emotions and norms are so contagious, and if you spend your days confronting one asshole after another, often the only way to survive is to throw the crap back at them.   Again, I don't know how much of this is true of the School of Journalism at Ohio University, but regardless of what happens after this case, it seems to that the leaders -- probably at the School level-- need to step and figure out what is going on and how to stop it.  In such situations, a change in leadership is usually necessary even if particular bosses are not to blame, they are so entwined with old destructive patterns and perceptions that replacing them is necessary for starting  anew.

Finally, to repeat my main advice about asshole infested places like this one seems to have become (I hope I am wrong, but if you read the above story, it sure seems like a reasonable inference), the best thing you can do is to figure out how to get out as fast as you can if you are trapped in such a human cesspool.

I just started blogging at Psychology Today last week. This page and blog will remain the place where I put the lion's share of my effort.  Most of my posts will appear here first, and then I will reprint some of them there to reach a different audience.  The name of my blog there is Work Matters: Straight Talk and Solid Evidence About Organizational Life.  I also will let you know when I write anything in Psychology Today that is now printed here.  For starters, I thought a good way to introduce myself to Psychology Today readers was to introduce them to a range of my old posts, so I have put-up slightly updated versions of Strong Opinions, Weakly Held, A Strange But Effective Way to Stop Employee Theft, and my post about Jim March's assertion that most claims of originality are actually reflections of ignorance, hubris, or both. 

If you have any suggestions about old posts that you would like me to reprint for Psychology Today readers, please let me know.  Thanks.

OK, so I know this is weird, but here goes.  We are considering different chairs as one avenue for the cover of my next book (more will be coming  here soon, but it will be called Good Boss, Bad Boss, and it comes out in September), and -- given that we don't have time to buy one fast enough and given we don't have permission to use the kind of picture we want -- we need to find a chair exactly like the one below to photograph.  If you have one, and live in the San Francisco area, we would be extremely grateful if you could let us send a photographer over to your place.  We are looking at other chairs, but the designer I am working with Susan Kare, who is renowned for many designs, including the icons on the original chair) and I are quite smitten with this chair because it is beautiful, iconic, and very storied -- designed by Eames for the Time-Life Executives, and then most famously, Bobby Fischer refused to play his famous chess match with Boris Spassky unless he has this chair. When Spassky saw it, he insisted on getting one too.  So, this a longshot, but if you have such a chair, we would be very grateful if you could allow us to photograph it... I promise signed copies of all my books and also I will be eternally grateful.  Just email me at bobsut@stanford.edu.  I know this a little crazy, but as we are under pressure to wrap this thing up, I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.   

I clearly have strong beliefs about what drives human behavior, and think there is pretty strong evidence to support many of them. At the same time, I believe equally strongly that there are no magical cures for organizational and individual problems, or any one theory that explains all human behavior. Behavioral scientists battle over these issues -- and they should, it leads to better evidence -- over things like nature versus nurture, extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards, cognition versus emotion, and on and on, and each of us -- me too -- is probably unduly biased in favor of our pet theories.  There is a lot of evidence out there to fuel different arguments and I often am bewildered about what causes human behavior (remember this research about how the sawmill stopped theft....if you read this in combination with Salt Passage Research, you can get completely confused). But, in reading so much of this stuff over the years --while it is clear that some behavioral theories and interventions work better than others -- the thing I am most sure of is that there no one golden theory that is by far the most powerful and effective, and that provides the golden path to success.

The corollary to this conclusion (which is evidence-based) is that when anyone claims they are hocking a theory that explains 75% of success in life, it is safe to assume they are selling you snake oil. To quote James March once again, as I suggested in my post on Good to Great, “Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimonial to hubris.”

I was reminded of this problem once again when I received an invitation for a workshop on emotional intelligence (called "EQ" sometimes) that an obviously well-meaning consultant was putting on at one of my kid's schools.  The advertisement for this event claimed that "EQ" was far more powerful for explaining success in life than "IQ," in fact, the advertisement claimed it explained 75% of success in life.  I am a big fan of the general idea behind emotional intelligence, and believe that more successful human-beings -- especially bosses --enjoy higher emotional intelligence, which researchers (the one's who apparently coined the concept and published the first studies) John Mayer and his colleagues define as "The ability to engage in sophisticated information processing about one's own and others' emotions, and the ability to use that information as a guide to thinking and behavior."  As I wrote to this consultant, I definitely think that the schools in my area would be better-off if everyone -- students, teachers, and administrators-- had higher EQ, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that (despite debate about exactly what it is and how it works), that more EQ leads people to more success -- and to have more civilized human exchanges too.  

Yet, much as the main popularizer of EQ apparently did, this consultant undermines her legitimate message by making excessive claims -- in March's lingo, claims that she wielding magic.  The case of EQ is interesting because, while Goelman and his colleagues were selling it as nearly a cure all (I went to one of his speeches, and he was making outrageous claims about the amount of variance in organizational performance that were explained by a leader's EQ), more careful research and more measured claims were emerging from Mayer and other researchers.  To this point, please read what Mayer and his colleagues wrote in an article published in the American Psychologist in 2008 called "Emotional Intelligence: Now Ability or Eclectic Traits."  On page 504, they argue:

A journalistic rendering of EI created and also complicated the popular understanding of it. Goleman’s (1995) bestselling book Emotional Intelligence began with the early version of our EI model but mixed in many other personality traits including persistence, zeal, self-control, character as a whole, and other positive attributes. The book received extensive coverage in the press, including a cover story in Time magazine (Gibbs, 1995). Because the book included, in part, the theory we developed, some investigators wrongly believed that we endorsed this complex and, at times, haphazard composite of attributes as an interpretation of EI.

The journalistic version became the public face of EI and attracted further attention, in part, perhaps, owing to its extraordinary claims. Goleman (1995, p. 34) wrote of EI’s importance that “what data exist, suggest it can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ.” A few years later, Goleman (1998a, p. 94) remarked that “nearly 90% of the difference” between star performers at work and average ones was due to EI. .... Our own work never made such claims, and we actively critiqued them (Mayer, 1999; Mayer & Cobb,2000; Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso,2000). More recently, Goleman (2005, p. xiii) wrote that others who believed that EI predicts huge proportions of success had misunderstood his 1995 book.

I suspect the consultant's claims about the magical powers of EQ simply were repeating these widely accepted beliefs -- apparently first perpetuated (but now denied) by Goleman.  In addition to sending this consultant the Mayer paper, I also sent her an article (summarized here) that analyzed 85 years worth of research and showed that, for better or worse, the strongest evidence we have is that IQ is mighty powerful predictor of success.  I hope I didn't come across as arrogant or overbearing when I suggested to her: "I am not an IQ freak at all, and in fact, I believe that it has a large social and economic component – and although my ideology and values press to me believe in EQ and related indicators of the ability to read and respond to others, I try to be careful to stick to the data and avoid excessive claims.  I think what you are doing is wonderful, but please be careful not to fall into the trap of making excessive claims to attract attention."

For me, all this raises an interesting question, or I suppose challenge, that I wrestle with constantly.   I believe in evidence-based management and also have strong opinions that are grounded in evidence but are also shaped by my values (e.g., no matter how much money you make, in my book you are still a loser if you are an asshole) and by the quirks of my experience in this life.   The challenge is to walk the line between selling ideas that I firmly believe can make organizations better places, without overselling them -- it is hard to do both because of the temptations (money and attention, for starters) and because, in many cases, people yearn for simple, powerful, and complete solutions to their problems (and keep asking for them even when you are careful to say that you don't have them and neither does anyone else).