How To Use Friction To Draw People In or Push Them Away | Bob Sutton

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28:21something that was near and dear to Sergey Brin's heart. Like he wanted this thing to be the future and moved fast, took all Google's resources and threw it at this problem without any friction. And it was a major flop. It's kind of interesting because, you know, I will give my book to various people to read early. And one of the people I gave it to last week, and she said, oh, this is just a great book. And then she writes me back. Oh, shit, I was on the Google Glass team. Did you have to go after us. But what happened, according to her report in the New York Times, is that it's a product development team.

28:57And this is consistent with the notion that creativity can take a long time and be messy. And it's hard to rush creativity too much. But what happened is, is the team didn't think it was ready. But there's this old thing of don't show stupid people unfinished work. And I'm not saying that what Sergey Brin is generally stupid, but I think he had a moment of stupidity and possibly arrogance here. And he got overly excited with this product and they're like, no, no, no, it's not ready. Yeah, yeah, it is. And he ripped it out of their hands. And the rest is history. It was total failure. So that's something where you have, when people have too much power and not enough friction stopping them, it can be a problem.

29:35So is there an equilibrium? We talked a lot about bureaucracies and things growing at such a scale where we're just creating busy work. Is there a lean mindset that we should take? And is there too lean where we remove all friction and then get those negative results? I like that. In some ways, that's a great question. So the question is, what's the sort of optimal one? I don't know whether this is to be self-critical or realistic, but I don't think that there's any management book or any how-to book on earth that you can just take it, read it, and then your life is cured. There might be, to me, what I tend to view a book like mine, or almost any book that I read that I think is going to be useful.

30:14It's sort of like my life is a series of meals that I put together. And gee, this might be a nice menu to help me assemble various meals. And to me, that's how I think of it. And I think it is presumptuous of me to tell the leaders, managers, anybody who's ever had a job in this, how to do their job, because I can't know enough about it. maybe some of the principles like adopting the subtraction mindset or slowing down to save her life. Those things might help you in specific instances. But well, I don't want to talk about it too much, but you said a little technical problem. I don't think my book can help you solve it.

30:54I think that you had to figure it out with your team. So I mean, but to me, that's the classic sort of things that I don't want to overclaim. I think that what is an optimal equilibrium does help. And some of the analogies help. One that really helps me a lot, which I've already said once, is this idea of think of yourself as being a NASCAR or Formula One racer. You don't go full speed the entire time. And even like a friend of mine, Andy Papathanasio, he used to head, he was like a pit crew head at Hendrix Motorsports. And then he was like the athletic director that had like eight different pit crews.

31:35And he said, what we figured out was the teams that tried to go the absolute fastest were not usually the best. Because what they do is they'd have four pit stops that were like five seconds. And then they'd have one that was 11 seconds. So what you want is consistency. So that's a case where he talks about more rhythm and pace rather than going completely pedal to the metal. Because when you're harried, you tend to make mistakes. But I don't know the exact optimal amount of going slow versus fast when it comes to a pit stop, but Andy does. So recognizing that a lot of this is to raise awareness both on the negative and the positive impacts of friction so you can have these conversations with your team members.

32:17And as you're trying to solve problems, recognize that those two things can exist. We can move too fast and get negative results, or we can bog ourselves down being too slow and not have enough chicken effers in place to help us move things forward. Yeah, I love that. And just as a little addendum, I would add in the most constructive, at least teams and organizations that I've been part of, when the problem gets solved, it's because people aren't just pointing fingers at others. They're taking a look in the mirror, which is we're back to self-awareness, which John has brought up. So when we look at ourselves and our career, a big part of our audience wants to accelerate things, wants to get promoted, wants to move into these leadership roles, but they might not be in a leadership role just yet.

32:59So they're feeling the friction, but they may not feel that they have much control over the friction. So what advice do you have for someone at that stage of their career where they're in a very friction-filled situation and they want to move up to leadership? what are some of the best things they can do to become a friction fixer and get that career success they're looking for? To me, there's two parts of that. That if you are on a team where you have colleagues and a boss who, when you go to them, when you do good things, even when you criticize them nicely and say, we can fix it, to me, that's the sign.

33:36If your boss as being receptive, then you're probably okay. But if you are in a situation, and this kind of some ways goes back to the no asshole rule. When I talk to my students who do well in their careers versus not so well, the ones who do well, if they're in good situations, they stay in them, they keep making them better. But one of my favorite expressions is quitting is underrated. And if you are in a situation, this isn't just about friction. I mean, where you give a real authentic sort of effort and are trying to help, and either you're being ignored or disrespected for doing it, then, gee, you might start looking for another job.

34:18So to me, a lot of it is picking your context. And I realize that many people, they might be in a situation where it's harder to find a job, and I'm not saying they should quit immediately. But just every student I've had over years, the smart ones know when to leave. So recognizing that that environment and context is so key to your success and being a friction fixer or could create a lot of needless friction in your life and stress. Part of that to me seems not only having the interview process and doing a great job, but then talking to your new potential team members about how do they handle friction on the team and how are those things seen by superiors so that if it's seen in a good light and there seems to be upward mobility tied to fixing friction, that's a great place for you.

35:02But if it seems like the team is recognizing friction, can't do anything about it, then maybe we have an asshole boss on our hands and we don't want to put ourselves in that situation. Or they're just incompetent. And I would also add that my wife was master of this during the years. She was a lawyer and stuff. That the best people often for finding out whether or not you want to work for that person is to talk to somebody who used to work for them. Because they are more likely to tell you the truth. I have a couple friends who got fired by Elon Musk. I think they give you very accurate information about what it's like working for him.

35:38And it ain't pretty. Yeah, recognizing that oftentimes the reason people leave is because it is that situation that you don't want to be putting yourself in. Or they get fired for doing something constructive. Yeah, that's not seen well. Well, there's another aspect of that too, which all of these companies are going to have a particular culture. That culture either has been set up because everything else was neglected, and that's the culture that built around that neglection, or it was intentional to build a specific culture that would induce a certain type of productivity that would serve that company very well.

36:18You're not going to be suited for all of those companies. And in the book, there's a wonderful example. I believe it was Google where the interview process eventually gotten so out of hand that people were going up to 20-some interviews and wondering what is going on, which is utterly ridiculous. Now, as somebody who is interviewing, you need to start to take notice that if you're on your 10th interview, you might be wanting to look at it. It might be a lot of friction. and it might not be the culture that you want to be entering in if you're looking for the fast track to leadership. Well, so that example of this is from Laszlo Bach.

37:00He was basically head of HR for about 10 years at Google. I've had him fact check this multiple times. And this is, to me, a beautiful example of using good friction to get rid of bad friction. They had a tradition, which actually made sense in the early days when they had a few hundred people. They'd interview the hell out of people for both technical skill And are these the people we can grow a great company with? So it was actually, they were really, really picky in the early days. And that made sense. But then it became a tradition that what got you here won't get you there. John, to your point, they were doing, and I remember fact checking the first time for the Wall Street Journal, I said five, 10, 12 interviews.

37:37And Laszlo said 25 once. At 25 interviews, just imagine the scheduling for whoever is scheduling that. And imagine the poor candidate. And so Laszlo just put in this simple rule. if you need to do more than four interviews for a job candidate, you have to write me to get written approval. So that's friction. It's good friction that got rid of bad friction. And he said that the excessive use of interviews dropped almost immediately. But that's a case where a little bit more mindfulness is also part of that too. For the candidate's position, you know, Google's a very prestigious job. Not only does it have all these benefits and perks, but it can really set you up for a career success.

38:18So there's going to be a ton of candidates who are willing to do 27 interviews and never give that feedback and never quit. So internally for Google, they're like, well, we're still getting candidates showing up for the 26th interview. So where's the friction? So that was probably true when Google had about a thousand employees and was the coolest employer in Silicon Valley. But one of the reasons Laszlo had to put this rule in is, well, actually during that era, Facebook was the coolest employer. Everybody has their moment, the coolest employer. And people would do two interviews and get a job at Facebook and they'd take it and they'd just leave the Google process.

38:53So when you're the coolest kid on the block, you can get away with abusing people a little bit more, I think. Yeah, the prestige covered up a lot of the friction internally. So you mentioned this concept of power poisoning in the book, and I would love to unpack that for our audience and what we can do if we're experiencing that? This is one of the things that I've been studying in various guises for years. But there's all of this behavioral science evidence. I'll talk about two. One is a lot of times when people get in positions of power, they don't have to struggle with the little inconveniences that the rest of us do.

39:29At the top of a giant bank or something, you might have your own private plane and all that sort of stuff. But it even might be little things, like we talk about the notion that General Motors, that employees down to a fairly low level, they don't have to deal with the hassle of buying a car. So that's one thing, is that one of the things that causes friction blindness is that when people get power, they don't understand the inconveniences that their customers and other employees go through. That's one thing. The other thing is there's a bunch of evidence that when we get in positions of power, something happens to our brain.

40:05This guy, Dr. Keltner, who wrote the book called The Power Paradox, got it right here. He even has made the argument that when people get power, it's almost like they have brain damage. And what they do is they focus more on their own needs, less on the needs of others, and they act like the rules don't apply to them. and he's done all these studies where the fancier, the more expensive the car people drive, the less likely they are to let pedestrians go by at the stopwalk, all this sort of crazy stuff. The danger when people are in power is they just don't pay much attention to what happens to people with less power.

40:41And there's also this thing, just think about a baboon and a troop, okay? So in a baboon troop or in any organization, attention is devoted up the hierarchy. So in the baboon, they look at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds because that dude can really hurt him or really help him, right? And that's kind of like that. So the problem with power poisoning is we aren't as aware about how our actions impose friction on other people. And just the classic thing, and we start the book with this, the first paragraph is a senior Stanford administrator wrote a 2 ,000-word email with a 7 ,000-word attachment and sent it to 2 ,000 or so employees.

41:21And And being the obnoxious, well, person I can be sometime, I started complaining to her boss. And I sent her an edit and said, gee, this could have been, let's do the math. Suppose this was only 1 ,000 words. Actually, it was 1 ,266 words. And I said it could have been 600. And I don't know why we needed such a long attachment. And to me, that's that sort of awareness that when you're in a position of power, you don't actually know what's going on. And one of my favorite stupid examples in the book, I heard about this from the executive assistant for a CEO of a Fortune 10 company. I don't know very many, but I ran into this woman once and she told me the blueberry muffin story.

42:00OK, so here's her boss. He goes to early meeting and he just says casually, it's a breakfast meeting, where's the blueberry muffins? That's all he said. You know, it was like small talk. Then for the rest of his life, everywhere he went, there was piles of blueberry muffins. Because it was in the notes. Don't forget the blueberry muffins. Loves blueberry muffins. And to me, that's like, I just imagine all these poor caterers and assistants running around for years, just trying to find blueberry muffins when they were hard to get. And it does seem like blueberry brand or who knows what the heck's going on.

42:35But to me, that's an example that when people are in positions of power, they're in danger of being oblivious to the effects of their actions on others. So recognizing that self-awareness around, okay, I'm in this new position of power. My brain actually changes. My behavior and style of interaction changes. And there are all these downstream consequences that either structurally I'm just not aware of because my life has gotten a little bit easier. I can park closer to the building. I have a larger stipend. I can fly business. And also looking upward, right? So that assistant doesn't want to be in another room where there's no blueberry muffins because now her job is on the line.

43:10So what can we do to be the antidote to that power poisoning if we ourselves might now be in a new leadership role? So this is back to John's stuff on self-awareness. And there's lots of ways to get self-awareness. One of my favorite ones, and this is a CEO of a nonprofit that I worked with for a bit, and it's very successful. And she had this philosophy of, at least she said in every office she'd ever worked in, she also ran a large law firm, so she had a lot of those too. She said, there's always one or two people who complain constantly or are known gossips. And she said, there's always going to be one.

43:44If you think you can get rid of one, you're living in a fool's paradise. And she said, so first of all, I become friends with that person so I can get the information from them and create psychological safety so they can complain to me. And then the other thing she said, which is more sneaky, is that if you become friends with that person, you can influence the gossip stream because they're your friend. But I like the idea. And then we have a whole bunch of other standard stuff in the book that you've heard of. One classic one is to the extent you can like shadow employees or work along with employees and understand the journey that they're going through.

44:19We have an example of a high school principal from New York City. And she was constantly saying, and this is friction, that why are all my students late? They're lazy. They gossip. They're smoking dope. I mean, they're on their phones, all the stuff that happens in high school, right? And so she started shadowing students. And she said it wasn't their fault. It was our fault. And, and I remember her telling the stories in Chicago and she said, so I followed this girl. She had a class in the basement. Her faculty member kept her two minutes late. She had three minutes to get up to the top floor, which was a seven, seven story building.

44:57She had like run up this and she had to change her tampon. So this is like, it was no way she was going to make it. And, and so then, so then what the principal did is she said, well, we, we started cracking down on teachers who kept students late. So that's changing. And the other thing is we gave him seven minutes rather than five minutes, you know, to go between classes. And I thought that was a pretty good example of her thinking that it was a student's fault when in fact it was structural friction that was in the system. So it sounds like raising that awareness is, especially in a position of power, is ingratiating yourselves and creating that open line of communication with a potential gossiper or someone who has all the information, but also just putting yourself in other roles from time to time to sit in another seat and experience the friction from another angle or another view to bring your awareness to it.

45:45Yeah, and I think that's why very often sometimes the best leaders, I'm thinking, I backed General Motors, so I'll say they were great, CEO Mary Barra. She's had every different, her last job was head of HR, but before that she was head of product development. Before that she was head of manufacturing. And before that she ran a plant. So somebody like that who's a CEO, they're not just from finance. They know how the whole thing sort of glues together. And I think that those sort of people, it's great to be able to have empathy for other folks if you don't have their expertise. So I should not practice doing heart surgery tomorrow, for example.

46:23I'd kill people. But the idea of also having people understanding how the organization as a whole works is really important. So in your research for this book, and it was a seven-year project, was there anything that was really sort of you going in, a preconceived notion around friction that shifted after doing these interviews and doing this research? If I would pick a preconceived notion, it was my bias that when it comes to government, I had two biases. One was it was unfixable, and two, the people who worked there didn't care. The more that I learned, actually the opposite is true. At least in many cases, I already talked some about the Department of Motor Vehicles at Sanford and how much the employees care about making things better.

47:07And one of my favorite examples in the book, there's a nonprofit in Michigan called Sevilla. And the folks at Sevilla were very upset because it's a benefits form that two and a half million people in Michigan complete to get things like food, financial assistance, health insurance and so forth. and it was a thousand questions long, 42 pages long. My favorite question was, when was your child conceived? And it was a really difficult form to fill out. And the folks at Sevilla, what they did was they started working with the government, including the people who ran the agency to fix the form. And the people in the agency were embarrassed about it.

47:50They actually just didn't quite know how to do it. And then they started working with citizens and they did a whole bunch of prototypes. And now if you fast forward the same form, it's been modified massively. Your audience can look it up. It's project reform. It's 80 % shorter and people make far fewer mistakes. It puts far less administrative burden on the system. And that was a case where everybody wanted to work together to fix the form. And to me, when I first heard, because I actually met the guy, Michael Brennan, who's a CEO of it before he started working on the form, he literally got on the ground and rolled out the form and said, I'm going to fix this.

48:28And I can say, who the, I just met him. Who the hell are you? You know, you meet somebody in three minutes, he's on his hands, his knees, he's rolling out this thing. And it was one of those things where it actually was possible, both the optimism and the fact that government can change. And so I guess if the state of Michigan can do it, maybe the rest of us can do it too. So that's some of the things that sort of changed. I felt better about the possibilities of fixing things because we started out very pessimistic in this project and we got more and more optimistic as it went on. Yeah, I think for us internally, one of the things that we've noticed, sort of two trends, the trend to automation and bringing more technology in with the hope of becoming more efficient, and now adding AI into the mix.

49:07I think a lot of people have blind spots around friction with technology and how it interacts with team members. And obviously, we've talked about a lot of different factors in that, but I'm really curious your perspective around AI and how it might create or impact friction in an organization? Well, what is it? I'm being very careful not to parade myself as an AI expert. Even the number of people I know who've become instant AI experts is kind of cracking me up. I didn't know they knew anything about AI until three months ago. But I do try to hang out with people who I think are actual AI experts.

49:40And here's what they tell me. So there's a woman I'm working with. Her name's Rebecca Hines. She's head of the Work Innovation lab at Asana and is doing a bunch of research. This is going back for six or seven years about AI implementations. And the thing that she is finding about AI implementations, and this is like the racetrack analogy we're talking about again, is if you just throw the technology at the people and say, if you don't start learning how to do it immediately, you're stupid. And this is happening in some organizations. I'm sorry, but it is. But if you take the time to work with them to both gain their acceptance and show them how it works and also to make your AI tools so that rather than having them be confused about how to improve their jobs, that the AI tools are modified to actually become assistants for their jobs so the tools become better.

50:33So that's where you sort of slow down both to have the iterative discussion between the people who do the work and the people develop the AI tools and get their acceptance. That's where it seems to work. And by the way, to say something good about Microsoft, Microsoft, despite all the sort of, it seems like AI tools have appeared immediately, they've been very clear about moving slowly with open AI to bring it in at a speed that they believe will not overwhelm us as users, will not cause legal problems, will not cause ethical problems. And there is some tension between OpenAI and Microsoft that OpenAI wants to go faster than Microsoft, but I think it's a constructive tension.

51:15So to me, that's the thing that I'm thinking about AI is that I think if we do it with a little bit of awareness and knowing when hit the gas and knowing when hit the brakes, I think they're going to be pretty good. And this is straight out of Microsoft's strategy. This is something they're public about. And so I have some hope. Bob, we'd love to hear one key takeaway way that you wish the readers and our audience would implement from the Friction Project? Well, let's be really specific. My favorite method that's in the book, which was developed with the aforementioned Rebecca Hines at the Asana Work Innovation Lab, is this meeting reset tool.

51:51Essentially, all that she did was have 60 Asana employees go through their standing meetings in their calendars and rate them in terms of how important they were and how much work they were. And then it turned out that about 20 % of their meetings were really a lot of work, but not very important. And then she worked with them to eliminate some of them, to make them less frequent, to make them smaller, to replace them with emails. And the average employee saved about four hours a month. And I don't think, and this is in Harvard Business Review and it's in our book and stuff, your audience can look it up.

52:29But to me, I think it's a pretty simple thing that I could do right now is I could just look at the standing meetings in my calendar and just sort of that I have in the next two months and just sort of rate them. And that might be just a little tool that might help them. Yeah, I think we'd all be happy to get four hours a month back. Yeah, an hour a week. Thank you so much for joining us, Bob. This is a pleasure. And where can our audience find out more about you and the Friction Project and the work that you do? I think if you just go to bobsutton.net, which is my website, you can find it. And, you know, the book's on Amazon.

53:01It's a book that'll be everywhere. And I think that's the main places to sort of go. Just bobsutton.net is where most of the major things about me are sort of hiding. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. Thanks so much. Thanks, John. Thanks, AJ.

53:24AJ, I really love this topic. And there was something that I want to just state again, because I can't mention it enough in this episode, that if you're finding connection difficult, there is either something that you're doing that is pushing people away or something that you are not doing that's pushing people away. And that is adding friction to your relationships that make it difficult for people to want to hang out. It was so important to recognize when you are the cause of that friction. and for Bob to share how we can overcome it. This week's shout out goes to Nicholas who writes, Hey everyone, I'm Nicholas, a computer software engineer who recently moved to Austin.

54:05I found myself in a new city, not knowing anyone and feeling a bit lost. Now I've been a long time listener of the AutoCharm podcast, so I felt that this was the perfect time to dive into the X-Factor Accelerator. And as a software engineer, I'm all about problem solving, but navigating a new social landscape is a challenge. Now, I have felt like a lone wolf and wanted to find my wolf pack. The Art of Charms X-Factor Accelerator Program gave me the practical skills and support of a network. It wasn't just about making friends. It was about understanding social dynamics and becoming more charismatic and leveraging those skills to truly connect with people.

54:47I learned how to take advantage of being the new guy in town to quickly ingratiate myself to a vibrant Austin tech scene. I've met plenty of creatives and like-minded individuals who not only enriched my social life, but also share my passions. The social capital strategy is easy to use and the Art of Charms value framework is incredibly helpful to understanding the intricacies of emotional intelligence. So to all my fellow software engineers or anyone navigating this new chapter in their life, I highly recommend the Art of Charm X-Factor Accelerator. It's not just about fitting in, it's about thriving.

55:26Trust me, it's been an invaluable investment in both my personal and professional life. Thanks to the Art of Charm team for creating such an impactful program. And this is why we love working with engineers and software developers so much. We are able to speak their language through all of the research that we have put together. This makes following these frameworks and strategies so easy. And not only that, but incredibly fun. Now, before we head out, could you do us and the entire Articharm team a huge favor? Head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It means the world to us and helps others find us.

56:06And another thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery. All right, everybody, go out there and have an epic week.

56:42Yeah, but I remember you Oh, yeah, I remember you You were my favorite But I found it a wrong way