Bob Sutton: Mastering Organizational Friction for Better Leadership

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0:49I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is the remarkable Bob Sutton. Bob is an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. He's known for his work on leadership, innovation, and workplace dynamics. He and I go back a long way, and we are both students in the science of assholes. Not in the medical sense, more in the behavior sense. He's even written a book on the subject called The No-Asshole Rule. Bob was a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford from 1983 to 2023. He is currently a professor emeritus there.

1:38His current book, The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, is a must read. Today we are going to discuss good friction and bad friction and assholes. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Bob Sutton.

2:08We got to go backwards in time a little bit. We got to catch up. So explain how many took the arse test, the asshole test. The asshole rating self-exam is a test that actually it's in my best-selling book the no asshole rule it was not called the asshole rating self-exam it's also a test that my wife wrote not me usually i write everything my wife doesn't even read my stuff but she was running a large law firm at this time aren't you a lawyer weren't you ever a lawyer i was a law student for two weeks

2:45most people take 20 years to figure out they hate law i did it in two weeks that's how smart you were she was running a law firm with about a thousand lawyers and i said my editor wants a test you got any ideas and she just thought of all the behaviors of all the lawyers who she was dealing with and she wrote in about 10 minutes and it was in the book but you read the book and you said let's call this the asshole rating self-exam and the rest is history and i looked it up people can still find the R's test, Guy Kawasaki, and 613 ,000 people had completed it last time I looked, which was in 2023.

3:24Thanks, Guy. Beautiful PR. You were a genius. I'm not sure that book would have been a bestseller without you. You were very helpful at just the right time. Thank you for all the royalty you've been sending me over the years. Yeah, you're welcome. It helped me pay for the Sacred Heart tuition. i had to pay some sacred heart tuition too ouch i'm so glad my kids went to cal state schools i started saving money when they graduated high school have you ever done any statistical analysis and figured out what the mean and average score of the arse test was or they just said it's not a scientific test you mean like electric polling yeah it's probably worse than electric Poland, to be honest.

4:10But the mean is about eight. So that means that you're occasionally an asshole. But who knows what the mean uses? Because a lot of times, even though it's a self-exam, people will fill it out with their boss in mind. So I do that sometimes. There was a point where to tell tales out of school that I had a chair at Stanford, who I thought was a certified asshole. And I just completed the R's to see how he got like a 12 out of 24, which is pretty high, actually in my biased opinion so it can be used for other purposes with your current view of the world do you think assholeness is on the rise or decline oh so there's two views of this and i one is that there's just a certain percentage of us who are assholes no matter what and that's what we call those certified assholes or i guess i call those certified assholes you know to use the name Donald Trump, I think pretty consistently across times and people, he treats people like shit.

5:07He really does. So I would say he's a certified asshole. And I wasn't so sure about Elon Musk, but he seems to be in the category too. But then there's people who, psychologists are fantastic at turning people into assholes. You just put them in a hurry. You have them be sleep deprived. Being around assholes is one of the best way to act like an asshole. I mean, perfectly normal people, they work with a bunch of assholes. It's like they pick up the vibe. It's contagious. But my rough sense is that because of the internet and because of the hurry sickness that we have and also another thing that does turn people nasty is when there's inequality and especially when inequality is obvious i'll give you an interesting example one of my colleagues katie de cells who i do research with she's a psychologist she studied air rage and she found Sometimes when you get in the plane, if you turn left, you go to first class.

6:00And if you turn right, you go to coach. But other times you have to walk through first class. If you found out in the planes where you have to walk through first class, there's more likely to be air rage by both people in first class and in coach because the inequality is made more obvious. She had a huge data set. So anything associated with inequality, it actually brings out the worst in both the powerful and the powerless. because the powerless kick down and the powerless kick up. So you end up with revolution and domination. So my hunch is things might be getting a little bit worse, but for time in memoriam, there's always been a certain percentage of us who are certified assholes and all of us can be temporary assholes under the wrong conditions.

6:44Do you think that being a certified mission-driven asshole is okay? I'm referring specifically to Steve Jobs. so let's talk you worked for steve jobs and i did not especially in my second asshole book who knows i should have written it the asshole survival guide i actually did a lot of investigation about whether steve was an asshole and here's at least what i came up with and my main source this is in the book was ed catmull so ed was head of pixar for 28 years met with steve every week for 27 28 years and here's ed's perspective so another believe it or not but ed's perspective is that the Steve Jobs, who you might have worked with, you worked with him before he was kicked out of the kingdom, right?

7:28Before and after. Oh, and after. So Ed's point, and you may disagree, is that Steve, after he got kicked out of the kingdom and had all the trouble at Nex, he actually became and went through the darkness or the wilderness, as Ed put it, he became actually a better person and a more humble person. And in particular, Coach Bill Campbell, who went for a walk with him every Sunday, helped him, if you will, stifle his demons a little bit. So I know that's accurate. And there's also another take on this, which is, this one is because I've spent way too much time thinking about and getting Silicon Valley gossip and stuff, is that there's also the other problem with the story, and Ed agreed with this, is at Apple, he was more of an asshole than Pixar, because Pixar had a less asshole-y culture, and it was just an investment for him.

8:18It wasn't like his life, like Apple was like his life. He knew he was the smartest person at Apple. He didn't know he was the smartest person at Pixar, and he had Ed Catmull and people like that. Brad Bird, the great director. So there's different takes on this. And the other thing about Steve, which you probably know, is Steve would do amazingly supportive things for people that were just almost irrational. He could be very loving and giving backstage. He didn't donate any money to anybody. Lorraine Jobs is doing that now. So there's two takes that maybe he was an asshole who succeeded. And then the other part is the Ed Catmull story that it was the Steve Jobs who became at least less of an asshole who got really, really rich.

8:59So I don't know which is true, but those are different stories that I tend to hear. Let's face it. There are people who are assholes who do succeed. We know this. Maybe Elon Musk will get fired from Tesla and come back a better person. Elon Musk is not a good person. Maybe he was. Oh, gosh. Okay, better person. A less bad person. Okay, less bad person. All right. So we covered the background here now. That's not bad. We cut up. I love a good acronym. And I spent a long time coming up with ARSE, right? Although we chat GPT, we could come up with that in five seconds. So I'm reading your book and I see gross, get rid of stupid shit.

9:42And I saw that. I said, oh my God, that's better than arse. No, I think arse is pretty good. Anyway. See, you want me to talk about it or you just want to ask? No, you can talk about gross. So where gross comes from is that all of us, at least in the United States and from my understanding, every country in the world now has electronic medical records. And we know we go to the doctor, the nurse practitioner, whatever. They spend the whole time filling out the form and looking at the screen and never looking at us. And this is a worldwide problem. It's actually one of the main sources of stress for physicians and nurses, too.

10:20This drives them crazy. So there's a woman named Hawaii. You know something about Hawaii. Aren't you spending some time in Hawaii these days? Yeah, absolutely. We just got back from Kauai just two days ago. Beautiful place. What a gorgeous place. I hope you flew in first class and pissed off all the coach people. First class on the way there, coach on the way back. The flight attendants were awesome, by the way. I've got to say, I've complained about United, but the flight attendants were awesome. Yeah, but was it a Boeing plane that should have been passed through quality control? It was a Boeing plane, actually.

10:52I was a little nervous. Actually, a 737 MAX. Oh, my God. But we lived. So this woman, there's a woman in Hawaii Pacific, which is the largest health care system in Hawaii. her name's melinda ashton and she was upset because they had these electronic medical records and all this stuff that people had to spend all their time sort of staring at the screen so she had this campaign and she censored it she said getting rid of stupid stuff even though it was really getting rid of stupid shit and she said give suggestions to our team maybe we can figure out how to simplify the systems they got 188 suggestions they implemented 87 and just one little example and I think I wrote it here it is so her team eliminated one click that was necessary for patient rounds and at least according to their calculations the approximately 1700 hours per month were saved at the four hospitals as a result and our book is about friction fixing and the challenges of friction and I love that example because our perspective is no matter where you are in an organization you can make things better or worse and she had the power to set up the getting Rid of Stupid Stuff campaign, which by the way, this was published in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title of GROSS, a very respectable academic journal.

12:08And she used her power to set up the GROSS system, getting rid of stupid stuff system. And then people throughout the hospital, nurses, aides, nurses, doctors were empowered to make suggestions, many of which were implemented. So to me, and this is a lesson from this book, we started writing this book just because we were pissed off about how hard it was to get things done and all these organizations like google google used to be so easy to get things done now honestly google it's so much harder to get things done there than general motors they have a cash machine and general motors has to make one car at a time which they usually lose money on so it's much harder to get things done at google than it is a general motors right now it's just turned into this giant hair ball of fiefdoms and bureaucracy it's just a mess it's nice having a hose that shoots in the money It is.

12:56I gave a talk at Google and I was paid, I don't know, a few thousand bucks. And I've spent weeks trying to get the money. I had to become a vendor. Then I had to join SAP. Then I had to join all this and that. I still haven't been paid. And you're still filling out the forms. So that's the same experience. Honestly, since we're talking about Google and speeches, the other thing that I know about them is there's actually four or five groups that are fighting over who owns the speaking. thinking and so there's four or five warring fiefdoms because oh so this is one of the other things that i like to look out for in silicon valley companies oh and my university stanford also suffers from this by the way which is spending money is a substitute for thinking so where this happens we got so much money and you say we're going to buy some new software we're going to start a new position we're going to start a new group and pretty soon your organization is filled with groups and software that nobody knows how to use or weave together.

13:52And so, yes, that sometimes money can be used to reduce friction, but sometimes the more money you have, just the worse it gets because you can buy more stuff and more people and more buildings. It's like more money, more problems. Who said that? Wasn't that like a rock?

14:14so you know i i think bad friction is kind of obvious you already mentioned a great example but what is good friction to your point when we started the book it was like anything that's hard to do the frictionless organization we want everything to be like really easy but then along Along the way, we figured out that something should be hard. Well, let's start out with one of our many famous Stanford dropouts, Elizabeth Holmes. So she didn't like the fact that the device, the fraudulent device that she developed to put it on U.S. Army helicopters, that she needed FDA approval. She was really pissed off.

14:51In fact, she got General Mad Dog Mattis to put pressure on the military to have her put it on anyways. And the bureaucrats fought back. And even Mattis eventually had to agree that it should have FDA approval. So I think the fact that it was impossible for her to put that in the helicopters is good. And to give you a contrary example, so I've got two students that are talked about in the book, amazing students, Amanda Calabrese and Greta Meyer. They started a company called Sequel. They're reinventing the modern tampon. They spent their whole undergraduate career taking entrepreneurship classes and figuring out the science of reinventing this tampon because they're athletes.

15:30It was leaking and everything. So they have reinvented the Tampa, and they claim after 80 years that they finally reinvented the product. And they got FDA approval. They got$5 million in venture capital. And in the name of full disclosure, I have invested$25 ,000 in the company. And I think it might be the first venture I've ever invested in, to be honest. I'm not like a venture capitalist like you were, at least. But they have gone the hard way. So that's an example. Some of the other things that should be slow. Boeing, Boeing. Talk about Boeing. Oh, Boeing. This is the classic case that to do things right, sometimes you have to slow down, you know, slow down and fix things.

16:09Sometimes it actually has to work. Yes, that's really important. That when things are complicated, that rushing through and cutting corners can kill people in the case of Boeing. Fortunately, not us yet. One other thing, which I think is important. I've been reading. Have you seen this book? Remarkable people. Have you seen this book? My copy came with socks. Most people don't come with socks in a headphone, though. I should be wearing the socks, really cool socks. And my wife looked at me and she said, ooh, those are high-quality socks, so you're not cheaping out. So anyway, so you know a lot about creativity.

16:39And have you ever interviewed Teresa Mabley from Harvard Business School? Seems like somebody you might have tripped over. No, I don't know who she is. Teresa's been studying creativity for 50 years. Amazing. Started as a Stanford PhD, and she's just been studying all aspects of creativity. and essentially if you look at her work and other research you can't hurry love you can't hurry creativity either there's a point where if you try to rush it the problem is there's a really high failure rate there tends to be constructive disagreement it's a messy complicated process with a low success rate and one of my favorite stories that's in the book was when jerry seinfeld was interviewed by the harvard business review and they said could mckinsey have made your process for Seinfeld more efficient?

17:25And he asked who McKinsey was, and they told him he was a consulting firm. And then he said, are they funny? And they said, no, believe me, we know McKinsey, they are not funny. They may be other things, they are not funny. And then he said, the hard way is the right way. It's not something you make more efficient. And just the same as the venture capital world, the way that Jerry Seinfeld does a routine is he goes to venues that are very small and tries a few hundred jokes and keeps 15 or 20 of them for its set or something like that. So creativity isn't efficient. Another thing that isn't efficient, and I just said you can't hurry love, there's all this evidence that the most effective teams, everything from startup teams to surgical teams to people actually who fly airplanes too, that the more they've worked together, the more effective they are, like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

18:15So you got that. and then the last and i'm just thinking of of you at this stage your life and that surfing which i just i admire you with the surfing so much it's just amazing how late in life you started how into it you are bob just in in the spirit of transparency i rescheduled this interview because i wanted to surf i said that to my wife i bet he's surfing hooray for you all right where'd you go surfing santa cruz oh good for you all right bless your heart you you're pretty sunburned too so this dovetails perfectly with your surfing this morning i hope you had the that the waves are good and you had a nice ride actually there's this amazing research which we just started getting into the book it's on savoring and so there's all this research about coping and there's all this bad stuff in life we got to deal with but this guy's name is fred bryant he's from the university of michigan originally and he's been savoring this notion that to have good mental health what you do is you anticipate something great you enjoy it while it's happening you reflect on how wonderful it is it's not just rushing through and checking the boxes and so to me this idea of strategic slowness and yes there's some things you got to do really fast if the blood's squirting out of me i want the surgeon to sew me up really fast.

19:36I don't want him or her to slow down and enjoy the moment. I want to get that shit done. But that idea of savoring is another thing, just from a leadership perspective, to slow down and to enjoy people and celebrate. And one of our mutual friends, David Kelly of IDEO fame, back in the 90s, I hung out at IDEO a lot. And that's one thing David was always so good about, which was like when they completed a project or they had something to celebrate. And that was a very intensive place in terms of how people work. In those days, he would rent an ice cream truck to come to IDEO and give away everybody free ice cream in the company just to get people to relax and enjoy life.

20:16And so that's another time, and maybe because we're both 70, at this point in my life that savoring sounds like a pretty good deal, actually. You also brought in your book the IKEA effect, right, which is savoring too. Savoring is strategic. That's making other people suffer. So this is the notion that labor leads to love. The IKEA effect is the harder you work at something, independently of its value, the more you're going to think it's important to justify all that effort you put into it. And my favorite thing about the IKEA effect studies, and we all know you go to IKEA, it's impossible to get through the place even.

20:49But the IKEA effect where they do the experiments was they show people a box and say, how much would you pay for this box? And people would say, I'm like$1.50 or something. And then they'd have them assemble the box. And then they'd say, how much do you pay for the box? It'd be like$3. bucks because I put all this work into my stinking box. So that's the IKEA effect is the notion that labor leads to love, which every fraternity, sorority, and military in the world knows that the Navy SEALs, that the suffering, this must be worth it. I'm suffering. We actually had Mike Norton on this week's episode of the podcast.

21:22So yeah, we're familiar with the concept. So, okay. But now, listen, as I was reading your book, it was like very clear to me okay so there's bad friction you got to take that out i understand the good friction which leads to savoring and higher quality and all that kind of stuff i give you a theoretical example because i struggle with the contextual judgment of friction so let me give you an example so some of my friends they have put astroturf on their lawns they don't have grass anymore they put astroturf so you could say that astroturf has reduced friction there's no more watering no more mowing no more all that but you could also say that a lawn a regular lawn increases good friction because you're outdoors you're exercising you're interacting with your neighbors but then you got to use a gas lawnmower to create pollution so like what is astral turf good friction or bad friction honestly this is a complete value judgment i would say that some things that are low friction are just bad tastes and if your friends have bad taste and low friction that's just fine and you know what it reminds me a little bit of there was this doctor i knew who every morning what he would do when he had coffee he would take really cheap instant coffee he would dump the water and he'd stick in the microwave oven and he'd stir it and he'd drink it and then run out the door and that's astroturf that's very low friction but go back i don't see any savoring in there i i savor my cup of coffee and in you know in my perspective that it's like why doesn't he just take caffeine like you don't even need to drink coffee at all if your goal is just to get the caffeine probably better for your stomach right so anyways i i would just stick with what is it low friction bad taste okay could you make the case that the postal service pony express telephone telegraph email text messaging zoom all remove too much friction i'll remove too much friction oh why do you say that because all of those things meant no more face-to-face interaction what we're talking about a situation where there's or even and now the thing would the same thing is instant checkout so in the process of the frictionless organization we're also removing the possibility for human interaction so in fact in the book we talk about this is back to savoring there's a chain of grocery stores the largest grocery store chain in the netherlands they're called jumbo and what they did is for senior citizens like us who might be lonely they came i'm a senior citizen i'm not lonely yeah me neither in fact i wish i was a little more lonely sometimes i spent four days with my adult kids no eight days so anyways for those who are lonely they have these chit chat lanes or slow checkout lanes.

24:15And we just fact check this. They start this in one store and they've scaled it to 225 of their stores. And the idea is you're getting in knowing it's sort of like a slow experience. So there are some things that should be higher friction for more sort of social interaction. And certainly that makes sense. And we know that it's like when you go to a three-star Michelin restaurant, you don't want to get in and out in 15 minutes. That's not what the goal is. Wow. That is an interesting concept, man. I gotta tell you though Bob I love whole foods because I can just hold my right palm over the center and I don't have to get out my wallet I don't even have to get on my iPhone I told my kids if I'm about to die cut off my hand you can get free groceries the rest of your life

24:59but but so that's actually a good example even though it's morbid about cutting off your hands that what good organizational design and that's why we have the subtitle that the right things are easy and the wrong things are harder or slower. But the other thing is I also think we're oversimplifying this in two ways. One is, and this is one of my favorite examples, is that what good leaders do is they figure out how to, or designers, how to use good friction to get rid of bad friction. So one of my favorite examples, and so we've been bashing Google, so I'll say something good about Google. You may know Laszlo Bach.

25:38Maybe you had Laszlo on your show. I'll show his book, Work Rules. Great guy. He was basically head of HR, people operations, whatever they call it, Google, for eight years. So he gets there. And Larry and Sergey did a pretty good job building the company and building the culture in the early days. But there's always that problem that stuff that worked in the beginning gets to be a problem. And one of the things they did in building the culture was, And I remember, actually, I have a tape recording from 2002 where I interviewed Larry Page, where he said, we're interviewing people 10, 15, 20 times because we want to build the right culture.

26:14And maybe that made sense in the early days. But so Laszlo gets there some years later, and the tradition continues. And he said, we've got people interviewing. And I remember doing the fact checking with him 10, 12, 15 times. He said 25 times. sometimes you get interviewed for a job 25 times and you don't get the offer this is a good way to waste a lot of effort so anyway so he came up with a simple rule which is if you're going to do more than four job interviews you just have to write me for written permission that's that was the whole simple rule and he said magically the excess of interviews or disappeared almost immediately and so to go back to the lesson what good designers are always trying to do is is to make it hard for people to add stuff that slows the whole system down.

27:02And the one that I'm doing some research on now with my friends at Asana is, we even had this on this call, which is that I saw two apps and I went to the wrong app and you had to send me the email for the right app. And what happens in many organizations, including my employer, Stanford, if you have a credit card at Stanford, you can buy software for your use or your team's use that therefore you impose on everybody who deals with you. And so what you end up having in organizations is, and they call this the credit card problem, is just zillions of different kinds of software and that causes switching and confusion and learning problems.

27:38And so what's happening in some of the companies we're working with is the CTOs are putting in more obstacles when you try to buy or renew software. So that to me can be good friction. So that's one thing that I like to think about. The other thing, which I think is also important, is friction can be weaponized so it's good for you and bad for other people in the most extreme case here of course are what they call roach motels which is the example we've all had you subscribe to something i had this with the financial times for example and it's absolutely impossible to get out of it where they ask you are you sure you want to get out this is a mistake mr sutton and i remember the financial times i had to go through 15 different questions and finally no no no i want to get out of no no no i want to get out of which this by the way is unlawful in the state of california but not other states now but that's another kind of way in which friction is used as weaponized to make it impossible for us to get rid of software and gym memberships things when i read that example it brought to mind something that i just happened to me last week i quit mailchimp i deleted my mailchimp account and it was in five seconds it was so fast i thought something is wrong here i could not have quit and then i quit so fast so i went on uh linkedin and i went on threads and i said kudos to mailchimp they let me quit so easily if only the rest of their company worked that well but well so but that's actually interesting because when we were working on the book, we talked to some of the folks at Netflix who were involved in the decision long before it was the law to make it really easy to quit.

29:24And including Patty McCord, who was head of H, are there for years, for 14 years. And she said two things. She said, first of all, in the early days when it was hard to quit, we were just embarrassed. Our friends would say, I tried to quit Netflix. It would be terrible. And the other thing she said, and this is the MailChimp thing, is she said, And we actually figured out from a long-term strategic standpoint that if it was easy to quit, we'd have really good data about dissatisfaction because that's much better than giving people a survey. If they're quitting easily, you get much more sensitive data about dissatisfaction.

29:55So one of the reasons she argued that Netflix has done so well in the long term is they've always had great data about customer dissatisfaction because it's so easy to quit. And also, it's not a subscription. You can quit anytime. Wow. I never thought of that. It makes intuitive sense. If you're so happy it was easy to quit, you're willing to invest some time giving the company feedback. That makes perfect sense. Also, the other thing Patty said about making it easy to quit is to come back that you're not going to get in a roach motel. Yeah. That you can quit again. The example is not to call out one of my daughters, but I got a daughter.

30:28I think you might have met, Eve. Went to school with your son. So, Eve, with all due respect, she's like the Imelda Marcos of the family. She loves her shoes. She has so many shoes. In fact, she just went to Europe with her boyfriend, and she sent me a picture of how proud she was of how she packed her five pairs of shoes in her suitcase from Carion. Literally, she's a shoe girl. So anyway, I see Amazon. Only five pairs. Oh, six. She was wearing one, remember? So anyway, for her, that's nothing. So anyway, I see how many shoes she returns to Amazon. It's just amazing. I honestly think that she only keeps one out of four pairs of shoes because unfortunately I see it.

31:06Because I think when I'm 90 and my kids are 50, there's still going to be in the family Amazon account. It's the same thing. Up next on Remarkable People. One definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience that the little people have to deal with. So what they'll do as senior executives, and I guess whiny professors like me, is that they create a completely friction-free experience that the little people are not protected from. Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It's our pleasure and honor to make the show for you. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it.