Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. You will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have Robert Sutten on the podcast. Sutton
Speaker 1: is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and Professor of
Speaker 1: Organizational Behavior by courtesy at Stanford. He co founded the
Speaker 1: Stanford Technology Ventures Program STVP and the Hasso Platner Institute
Speaker 1: of Design, which everyone calls the D School. Sutton received
Speaker 1: his PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan
Speaker 1: and has served on the Stanford faculty since nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: He's a senior scientist at Gallop and academic director of
Speaker 1: two executive education programs, Customer Focused Innovation and the Stanford
Speaker 1: Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate. He has served as professor at
Speaker 1: the host Business School, a fellow at the Center for
Speaker 1: Advanced study in the Behavioral Sciences, a fellow at IDEO,
Speaker 1: an advisor to McKenzie and Company, and faculty at the
Speaker 1: World Economic Forum at Davos. Wow, Robert Sudden is so
Speaker 1: great to chat with you today. It's great. I'm just
Speaker 1: it's just because I'm so old. That's what happens. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of old people who don't do one
Speaker 1: fiftieth of that. But thank you. Yeah. No, it's really
Speaker 1: obviously impressive but interesting to see you dive into so
Speaker 1: many different elements. And I'm curious and we'll talk about Well,
Speaker 1: I let me all start off by asking you, do
Speaker 1: you see a main thread that we've through a lot
Speaker 1: most of this work, Well, I don't know. Looking for
Speaker 1: consistency is always a bit of bullshit. But still I'm
Speaker 1: an organizational psychologist, which I think is the most important
Speaker 1: thing about me. I was a psychology major for eleven years.
Speaker 1: I like you, that's all. And then I became an
Speaker 1: engineering professor, which is still completely bewildering after thirty seven years.
Speaker 1: But if I would say the thing that really goes
Speaker 1: back to my education for my mentor Robert Kahn, that
Speaker 1: what I think about is the interplay between the individual
Speaker 1: and the organization. That's what I'm always thinking about, is
Speaker 1: is there sort of this individual has these psychological tools
Speaker 1: and limits and biases and so on, and abilities to
Speaker 1: of course, you very much into abilities, but then there's
Speaker 1: the constraints of the social system which both constrains them,
Speaker 1: and there's also a human construction too, So always the
Speaker 1: interplay between the organization and the person. That's always kind
Speaker 1: of how I think I can't help. That's great that
Speaker 1: you're thinking along those lines. I don't think every organization
Speaker 1: thinks along those lines, right, I Mean a lot of
Speaker 1: organizations will completely ignore the basic needs of the people
Speaker 1: working there and thinking that, well, we just tell them
Speaker 1: what the mission is, they'll they'll go for it. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if we just tell people, they'll do it, right, even
Speaker 1: though even though the smart ones realized you that might
Speaker 1: be stupid to do what I'm told, huh, or self
Speaker 1: destructive or give me a reason. Yeah. Well, are you
Speaker 1: familiar with McGregor's distinction between theory X and theory Y. Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Famous. Yeah. People are evil, people are good,
Speaker 1: and then you design a completely different organization. Yeah. McGregor
Speaker 1: was like one of those people. I was raised with
Speaker 1: early theory edges legend right, and so many people are
Speaker 1: not aware of. Abraham Maslow came around and he posited
Speaker 1: a theory Z. Did you know about his theory? Z?
Speaker 1: Theory Z is so whenever I talk to organization psychologies,
Speaker 1: they haven't heard of that, And so I feel so
Speaker 1: excited that I a chance to, like, I'm excited to
Speaker 1: tell people that. So Masol read the writings of McGregor,
Speaker 1: and of course McGregor cited Masil a lot. They were
Speaker 1: both in the same generation, right, But Mazill's like, I
Speaker 1: don't think he went I don't think McGregor went far enough.
Speaker 1: So theory acts. So theory through why is essentially the
Speaker 1: self actualized person, the person who's doing good work. But
Speaker 1: Maxwell's and I think that that we need like room
Speaker 1: for the transcenders and that's what he called theories those
Speaker 1: who were motivated by higher values outside of themselves as
Speaker 1: well as these peak experiences in life. And yeah, and
Speaker 1: he wrote a paper on that, and maybe people don't
Speaker 1: know about so yeah, kind of it kind of sounds like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's another probably the most famous living organizational psychologist. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm our friend Adam Grant. I mean, at Adam, that's
Speaker 1: what being a giver is about. It's not just about
Speaker 1: taking care of yourself and me, me, me, it's being
Speaker 1: a giver A little bit of that there. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: remember I actually talked to at him when I was
Speaker 1: working on my book and tone about theory Z and
Speaker 1: he was super interested in, Yeah, well, should we dive
Speaker 1: into this really interesting article of yours fifteen things? I
Speaker 1: believe sure, And because there's a lot of ground to
Speaker 1: cover there, and there's so much to think about, and
Speaker 1: You'll have like one sentence and then I'm like, whoa,
Speaker 1: I'm going to spend my whole day about one sentence.
Speaker 1: So first of all, tell me how you came about
Speaker 1: this list of twelve things. You said it was an
Speaker 1: ending ritual, It came out of an ending with yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I've been teaching, you know, the first time I
Speaker 1: ever taught Introduction Organizational Behavior, I now realize, was in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty at this at the at the University of
Speaker 1: Michigan School of Business. I've been teaching this class a
Speaker 1: long time and I got paid three hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five dollars a month to do it the first time
Speaker 1: I did it too, and so anyways, So so I've
Speaker 1: been was that good? Was that good money for academic nineteen?
Speaker 1: Well it was, it was, you know, it was enough
Speaker 1: to live in ann Arbor in the early eighties. Was
Speaker 1: it sort of like the last day? I never quite
Speaker 1: know what to say, you know, it's like the final
Speaker 1: like and in people. And I used to say, ah,
Speaker 1: people don't need closure, but I think we actually all
Speaker 1: do need closure. So what I started doing was I
Speaker 1: came up with there was twelve things I believe, ten
Speaker 1: things I believe about leadership that were sort of just
Speaker 1: a way so we can have some closure. And typically
Speaker 1: what I do and still do and I fus with it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I do ten, sometimes I do fifteen. They're always
Speaker 1: sort of changing in and out. But I tried to
Speaker 1: bring in some concepts from the course, some new concepts
Speaker 1: I haven't thought about before. And then as we'll probably
Speaker 1: get to I kind of end by saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about work all week, and Stanford is
Speaker 1: one of the most work focused places I've ever been
Speaker 1: in my life. Capitalism, capitalism, money, me, me me, career, career, career,
Speaker 1: that's kind of Stanford is. You know, work is kind
Speaker 1: of overrated, So we kind of end on that and so, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just a little ritual and people seem to
Speaker 1: appreciate it, so I kept doing it. Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: that the work is overrated. One. We didn't get there yet,
Speaker 1: but that's one of your things in the list. I
Speaker 1: love that. So okay, let's start with number one. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the best management is no management at all. First, do
Speaker 1: no harm. Why is that? So? There is this tendency,
Speaker 1: you know, and some people are more prone to it
Speaker 1: than others who are leaders, to get in people's face
Speaker 1: and to push them into micromanage them. And there are
Speaker 1: situations where you do need to give guidance, you do
Speaker 1: need to correct people, and you lead. But in fact
Speaker 1: there's two bits of evidence that show that it's a
Speaker 1: bad There are bad times to get in people's face.
Speaker 1: As the first one. My co author and friend Jeff
Speaker 1: Feffer has done a bunch of lab studies with Childini
Speaker 1: actually the famous influence guy, that show that the harder
Speaker 1: managers work on micromanaging, the more input they give, the
Speaker 1: more advice they give, the better they think they're work.
Speaker 1: The subordinates do independently of the quality of the work
Speaker 1: of their subordinates, because it's just this effort justification thing. Okay.
Speaker 1: And then and then another twist is, at least my
Speaker 1: reading of research on creativity, which you've done all sorts
Speaker 1: of wonderful stuff on creativity, is that the more guidance
Speaker 1: you give people, the more closely you evaluate them, because
Speaker 1: they're afraid to screw up in front of the boss,
Speaker 1: the more likely they're to use tried and true solutions.
Speaker 1: So I sort of think of of of, if you
Speaker 1: will management a little bit like surgery or medicine, which
Speaker 1: is first, do no harm. So that's so that's sort
Speaker 1: of one that I like to start. Wait, that's that
Speaker 1: you just blew my mind. Okay. So their programs there there,
Speaker 1: you know, courses introduction organizational management. So what would you
Speaker 1: here's just a thought experiment, what would you relabel that course? Oh?
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's sort of like management, something like
Speaker 1: like like like when to get in their face and
Speaker 1: when to get out of the way. Because that in fact,
Speaker 1: Frank Flynn another kind of organizational psychologist at Stanford. He
Speaker 1: he's done all all this this research with Actually Dan
Speaker 1: Ames is a psychologist at n y U. As I
Speaker 1: recall that that that shows that the most important characteristic
Speaker 1: of a good leader is assertiveness. They know when to
Speaker 1: push people and they know when to back off. So
Speaker 1: and I'm not saying that managers should just let things go.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying they're useless or unimportant, but but the
Speaker 1: bias is for them to get in people's face too much,
Speaker 1: and they got to be careful good. I like that.
Speaker 1: The same same rules seem to apply for sports coaches too.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I really love that. Okay,
Speaker 1: Number two, the best leaders have the attitude of wisdom,
Speaker 1: the confidence to act in their convictions, and then humility
Speaker 1: to keep searching for and acting on evidence that they
Speaker 1: are wrong. Well, this is just basically stolen from a
Speaker 1: Bazilian philosophers. And then and you're a psychologist, and the
Speaker 1: psychologist got in the wisdom business. And there's all these
Speaker 1: definitions psychologists. But the one I saw of like the
Speaker 1: like the most is this notion which futurists use too,
Speaker 1: is is that uh is have the confidence to act
Speaker 1: and the humility to think that you might be wrong.
Speaker 1: So in the futurist business, I was on the board
Speaker 1: and to the future for a year. A few years
Speaker 1: they have this notion of them, Oh, they're crazy, They're
Speaker 1: they're such a there I can't believe they are a
Speaker 1: nonprofit consulting firm. They're so flaky. I love them. And
Speaker 1: and the idea that that that the best way to
Speaker 1: approach the future is to have strong opinions because then
Speaker 1: people know where you stand, and you can you know
Speaker 1: your ideas, I but weekly held, so you're kind of
Speaker 1: always looking for evidence that that you might be wrong.
Speaker 1: And for leaderships. As we're talking about leadership, if you
Speaker 1: have a wishy, washy boss, nobody wants to follow them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and even I have a colleague, Kathy Eisenhardt, who's
Speaker 1: been studying startups for forty years, probably the most. I
Speaker 1: think she's the most widely cited person in strategy, and
Speaker 1: some of her early research showed that the best way
Speaker 1: to run a startup was essentially whatever you were doing,
Speaker 1: whatever your strategy to do it, tell everybody was the
Speaker 1: way to do it until the moment you thought it
Speaker 1: was wrong, and then pivot to the new direction and
Speaker 1: say no, we're all going this way and then and
Speaker 1: that's kind of consistent with this idea of having strong
Speaker 1: opinions weekly held because you kind of know where you're going,
Speaker 1: but you're always looking for signs you might be wrong.
Speaker 1: Let's go number three, because this one she had me
Speaker 1: thinking a lot about this one. Indifference is as important
Speaker 1: as passion on that one. Well, you know that I
Speaker 1: used to think this was sort of an original idea.
Speaker 1: But didn't somebody write a book called Guess We Can
Speaker 1: with a subtle heart of not giving a fuck. It's
Speaker 1: sort of the same thing on my podcast. Yeah, Mark Man,
Speaker 1: I stole my idea, and I probably stolen somebody else
Speaker 1: so so. But the fact is, I think that if
Speaker 1: you care about everything and try to please everybody, well,
Speaker 1: two things that happens. You try to please everybody, you
Speaker 1: try to please no one and the and the second
Speaker 1: thing is is if you give your all to absolutely everything,
Speaker 1: you end up burning out and doing nothing well. And
Speaker 1: by the way, I thought about replacing that, which is
Speaker 1: with something like everything worth doing is not worth doing well.
Speaker 1: In fact, somethings are worth doing badly that you have
Speaker 1: to do. I'll give you an example in my own life.
Speaker 1: At Stanford every year they give us this really long
Speaker 1: form to fill out for our annual performance evaluation system,
Speaker 1: and it's really long, and apparently there's a really complicated
Speaker 1: algorithm to determine the raises of faculty, and it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: I even had to fill it out this year, and
Speaker 1: we're having no raises because we're having a freeze. And
Speaker 1: the thing that I figured out is there's no relationship
Speaker 1: between how much effort I put into that form and
Speaker 1: the size of the rais I get. I just have
Speaker 1: to turn it in and then I get whatever the
Speaker 1: standard raise is. The only thing that determines the size
Speaker 1: of my rais is whether I get an external job
Speaker 1: off or otherwise I get like two percent. So why
Speaker 1: would I put a lot of effort into something where
Speaker 1: all I have to do is turn into form, no
Speaker 1: matter how crappy it looks. Yeah, what's the mass of quote?
Speaker 1: What's not worth doing? Is not worth doing well? He
Speaker 1: said the opposite, Yeah, he said, Well, he said it's
Speaker 1: not worth doing? Is not worth doing well? Yeah? So yeah,
Speaker 1: what what do you make of Because we live in
Speaker 1: this moment where a lot of people are saying silence
Speaker 1: is bad, you know, an indication that you're you're part
Speaker 1: of the problem, if you're if you're being if you're
Speaker 1: indifferent to someone's cause, well, well, that's that's difference. I
Speaker 1: I I think that silence there's sometimes when you need
Speaker 1: to be silent to listen. But silence because of fear
Speaker 1: is really a bad sign. And sometimes silence because of fear,
Speaker 1: of course is rational because there's some situations and you're powerless.
Speaker 1: When you speak out, you're going to get crushed or
Speaker 1: hurt or killed. I mean, we we know this, but
Speaker 1: but but to me, the notion in general that silence
Speaker 1: is not golden, I think on average is true, especially
Speaker 1: when you have silence by people have less power, because
Speaker 1: that's almost always a bad sign. That's one of the
Speaker 1: main things I look for when I go into organizations
Speaker 1: and like just go to a meeting, is there's sort
Speaker 1: of the boss and everybody else in the room. If
Speaker 1: everybody's afraid to speak, and the only thing they do
Speaker 1: is kiss up to the boss and agree with the boss,
Speaker 1: we know whether things are bad, things are bad. Yeah, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that can apply to lots of situations. You know. I'm
Speaker 1: a real big fan of my friend Susan Keane's work,
Speaker 1: and what I really like about our work is because
Speaker 1: I'm more of a I like to think more before
Speaker 1: I talk. But I noticed that. I mean, there's so
Speaker 1: many people, especially on social media, who just like to talk.
Speaker 1: They like to talk like that's what they enjoy doing,
Speaker 1: is talking right before thinking it's through. And how can
Speaker 1: we give more opportunities and encouragement to those who aren't
Speaker 1: the fast you know, the fast talkers, but even the
Speaker 1: fast thinkers. Well, of course you know Jeff Effer and
Speaker 1: I. I I can't remember what's on the list of fifteen
Speaker 1: we're even looking at today. But but Jeff effern I
Speaker 1: wrote about the smart talk trap in an American society
Speaker 1: and organizations, you often get your word for saying smart
Speaker 1: things and not doing them. But to me, one of
Speaker 1: the things leaders can do, and I had a good
Speaker 1: department chair who named Peter Glynn, who did this is
Speaker 1: what they do is that they stifle the big mouth
Speaker 1: people like me, I talk too much. And what they
Speaker 1: do is they call them the introverts. They call them
Speaker 1: the people less power. And I can, just in my
Speaker 1: mind's eye, I can I have a picture of Peter
Speaker 1: Glynn going around the table with a twenty five or
Speaker 1: us SO tenure and tenured track faculty in my department,
Speaker 1: the big mouse. The former chairs are all trying to
Speaker 1: talk like me the Okay, I wasn't thinking of you
Speaker 1: by the guilty I gotta I gotta own my weaknesses.
Speaker 1: And then there's people I think of my colleague how Lee,
Speaker 1: who's really smart but doesn't say very much. Call on
Speaker 1: how call on the new assistant professor, and the new
Speaker 1: assistant professor doesn't want to say anything, and then Peter
Speaker 1: kind of pulls them back stagency. We want to hear
Speaker 1: from you your future. So so that to me, that's
Speaker 1: that's good leadership, is that you do reverse status status differences,
Speaker 1: you shut down the people who talk too much. So
Speaker 1: to me that that was really impressed about having Peter
Speaker 1: as a chair. Okay, so let's go uh number four.
Speaker 1: The best leaders know what it feels like to work
Speaker 1: for them. Tell me about that one. Well, so it's
Speaker 1: so it's a lot easier to manage other people's work,
Speaker 1: first of all, when you understand how they work, how
Speaker 1: it happens. And then the other thing, and this is
Speaker 1: sort of that and I just I just saw I
Speaker 1: saw something about this with Fauci, the very controversial you
Speaker 1: know Fauci that are leading epidemiologists, that that that that
Speaker 1: that during I think was the last Sarrus crisis. That
Speaker 1: that that that he put on a mask and got
Speaker 1: in the room with people infected because he wouldn't ask
Speaker 1: people to do something he wouldn't do himself. That's wow,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's what a dude. Man. But But but
Speaker 1: the other part, which this is an empathy thing, and
Speaker 1: and and you this comes in your work a lot,
Speaker 1: just the ConA kind of intelligences that you talk about.
Speaker 1: This ability to understand how you're coming across emotionally and
Speaker 1: how you're making other people feel. I mean, in some
Speaker 1: ways the book I wrote, Good Boss, Bad Boss, in
Speaker 1: some ways that's the theme of the whole thing is
Speaker 1: good leaders understand when they're making people upset, when they're
Speaker 1: making people happy, when they're being listened to, when they're
Speaker 1: being shut out. And in the part that I always
Speaker 1: make is this isn't just because they want to be nice.
Speaker 1: The most successful leaders also what to use that so
Speaker 1: they can manipulate people to their own ends. So so
Speaker 1: understanding how you're making other people feel to me is
Speaker 1: one of the hallmarks of a great leader. You all
Speaker 1: said they also resist the temptation to to believe and
Speaker 1: reward those who butter them up with flattering bullshit and
Speaker 1: make it safe for followers to tell them uncomfortable truths.
Speaker 1: Now that one seems really really important in the workplace
Speaker 1: because again, like that seems a dovetail with what you're
Speaker 1: saying about. You know something's wrong when you go to
Speaker 1: a workplace and everyone's just kissing up to yap the boss. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: that's straight out of I don't know that. You know,
Speaker 1: we interviewed her, but Amy Edmondson from Harvard School. I
Speaker 1: love her. She's going to be on the podcast later.
Speaker 1: She's fabulous. We're old friends. So she's been studying psychological
Speaker 1: safety forever and that's essentially her findings are when when people,
Speaker 1: when the leaders aren't hearing and thinking about the uncomfortable
Speaker 1: truths constantly, that all sorts of bad things happen. So
Speaker 1: space shuttles explose, patients die, good employees leave, nothing good happens.
Speaker 1: I believe it. I've seen it. Yeah, Yeah, we've seen it. Yeah. Five.
Speaker 1: This one got me thinking, fight as if you were right?
Speaker 1: Listen as if you were wrong? Now, why the fight
Speaker 1: is if you were right? Part? Can you explain that
Speaker 1: to me a little bit? Well? Well, so, so a
Speaker 1: lot of this comes from well, it comes from research
Speaker 1: on teams that are most effective in the kind of
Speaker 1: conflict they have, and teams that are most effective, especially
Speaker 1: doing non routine work problem solving creativity, they argue over
Speaker 1: different points of view. You certainly can see this at Pixar.
Speaker 1: In fact, I've got some great video of arguments in
Speaker 1: a team led by Brad Bird where people will argue
Speaker 1: and fight in an atmosphere mutual respect. So the reason
Speaker 1: that you want to have when there's constructive conflict, people
Speaker 1: will argue as if they're right and push their point
Speaker 1: of view because that's how you sort of develop the
Speaker 1: argument and maybe convince others. But then when other people
Speaker 1: push back, what they do is they actually that means
Speaker 1: they shut up and consider that they might be wrong.
Speaker 1: So this is a little bit of wisdom. And by
Speaker 1: the way, this is speaking of psychologists. This is stolen
Speaker 1: from probably my favorite, one of my two or three
Speaker 1: favorite psychologist, car Wike, one of the most imaginative people
Speaker 1: I've ever met in my life, and that's sort of
Speaker 1: a Whikian sort of thing. So it's stolen from him. Great,
Speaker 1: and so that seems to dovetail with your other one
Speaker 1: about having the confidence, but then the humility. You could
Speaker 1: be wrong. Yeah, well I guess I guess these are
Speaker 1: all pausively correlated in a statistically significant level, right yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: well let's see if a real scientist can show us
Speaker 1: that I've gotten so applied in my old age that
Speaker 1: i still read the more rigorous stuff, but I'm more
Speaker 1: into applications. It's helpful for you at all, but I've
Speaker 1: been Yeah, I'm trying to tell you as some of
Speaker 1: the overall patterns I'm seeing here. Oh good, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: says six. We want we don't want to make this
Speaker 1: an explicit I guess we already made explicit with the
Speaker 1: bullshit word, so I'll just go for it. Fear the
Speaker 1: clusterfuck those debacles and disasters caused by a deadly brew
Speaker 1: of illusion, in patience, and incompetence. So this is fear
Speaker 1: the clusterfuck. So I actually have a really funny story.
Speaker 1: So this is about this. So in the book that's
Speaker 1: from Scaling Up Excellent, it's called the clusterfug FuG And
Speaker 1: I literally had an argument with my editor that he
Speaker 1: wanted to put on the cover of the book which
Speaker 1: I wrote with huggey Row, that I was the best
Speaker 1: selling offer of the author of The No Asshole Rule,
Speaker 1: And I didn't want the word asshole on the cover
Speaker 1: of the book because I thought I shouldn't drag poor
Speaker 1: Huggy into the asshole thing. But then he wouldn't let
Speaker 1: us use the word fucking the book and the same
Speaker 1: like the same, like twenty four hours, so it became
Speaker 1: clusterfug So what that's from is that Huggy and I
Speaker 1: have like a little sort of theory in our head,
Speaker 1: which I think is based on some research, which is
Speaker 1: that when we look at situations where people make terrible
Speaker 1: decisions the launch of the Space Shuttle, we use the
Speaker 1: example of an IT system that was launched at Stanford.
Speaker 1: Maybe my favorite one would be the Google Glass. It's
Speaker 1: almost a perfect example. That's how I use talk the
Speaker 1: launch of Google Glass. So when leaders, essentially they have
Speaker 1: the illusion of how great things are going and how
Speaker 1: smart they are, then they're impatient to get it going,
Speaker 1: and then their own incompetence turns other people in competent.
Speaker 1: So if you look at the story of Google Glass,
Speaker 1: it's a great example of this. What Sergey Brinn did
Speaker 1: was they had a prototype of Google Glass in X
Speaker 1: now Google X and the team showed it too many
Speaker 1: said oh, that's great, let's throw it in the marketplace.
Speaker 1: He said no, no, no, it's not ready. He said, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it's ready. We're so smart, we can do it, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. So then he drags it out of their hands,
Speaker 1: get the illusion of the impatience. His incompetence turns them incompetent.
Speaker 1: They can't figure out what to do, and it goes
Speaker 1: down in history. Is one of the worst products it ever.
Speaker 1: And so that's a sort of recipe for human for
Speaker 1: human disaster. And you know, it's almost always people have
Speaker 1: too much power and too little humility. And I don't
Speaker 1: know what kind of intelligence you would call it. Who
Speaker 1: sort of screw that up? Machiavelian intelligence? Yea, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't even know whether Sergey is Macavelli. And he just
Speaker 1: had too much success and too much money and figured
Speaker 1: he could do whatever he wanted. So yeah, maybe there's
Speaker 1: no kind of intelligence there that they were on the
Speaker 1: wrong path. There's something else. It's not an intelligence. Well,
Speaker 1: it's just maybe it's a stupidity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well
Speaker 1: I didn't want to say that, but that definitely sounds
Speaker 1: like a cluster FuG regardless of whatever. Okay, seven, this
Speaker 1: one's interesting. Big teams suck? Is that always true? Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's mostly you might be able to find some exceptions.
Speaker 1: But since since you're a real psychologist, I don't get
Speaker 1: to talk one very often. You remember the famous Miller's
Speaker 1: paper seven plus or minus too about that we can
Speaker 1: only it's one of the most famous papers in psychology,
Speaker 1: that we can only hold up to nine bits of
Speaker 1: information in our head. And that sort of seems to
Speaker 1: translate to teams. And if you look at old team
Speaker 1: research by one of my mentors and Amy Edmondson's too,
Speaker 1: Jay Rich, it happened he would sort of show you
Speaker 1: once he hit over ten, things sort of fall apart.
Speaker 1: And we've got all sorts of studies in different situations where,
Speaker 1: especially when people do tight interdependent work, once you get
Speaker 1: over six or seven you're sort of in trouble usually,
Speaker 1: and and so two things happen. It's it's just a
Speaker 1: cognitive load problem that that that that essentially, when you've
Speaker 1: got more people, moods and activities to keep track of,
Speaker 1: then uh, first of all, what happens is you spend
Speaker 1: more time coordinating and less time actually doing the work.
Speaker 1: That's what you'll see in study after study because you
Speaker 1: spend all this time coordinating him. And then and then
Speaker 1: the other thing that happens is because you're not in
Speaker 1: tune with him and you can't keep track of it,
Speaker 1: you start having more disagreements and problems. So, so I mean,
Speaker 1: you're you're like a good cognitive you have a peahd
Speaker 1: in cognitive psychology or something like my background. That's right,
Speaker 1: you should know this stuff. You know this stuff a
Speaker 1: lot better than I do. But it's it's so the
Speaker 1: argument is sort of a cognitive load problem. Yeah, can
Speaker 1: you can you give a specific example of how too
Speaker 1: big of a team led to a product that was
Speaker 1: a failure. Well, I know it's a product, but it's
Speaker 1: one of my it's x a performance example. So we
Speaker 1: had the America's Cup yacht race. Yeah, I love the
Speaker 1: ear sailor. By the way, what happened was was that
Speaker 1: Larry Ellison, whose team ultimately won. Well, at least I
Speaker 1: used to be a good sailor. Now I can hardly
Speaker 1: sail at all. But but what happened was Larry Ellison
Speaker 1: was funding this huge America's Cup effort. And they moved
Speaker 1: from five person boats to eleven person boats. Okay, so
Speaker 1: Jimmy spil Hill who was the winning skipper, and one
Speaker 1: of my friends, Perry Claybine, got to know him. So
Speaker 1: what happened is they moved from the five person boat
Speaker 1: to the eleven person boat. Yeah, and they go out
Speaker 1: sailing in San Francisco Bay. They capsize the boat and
Speaker 1: this is a seventy five foot, fifteen million dollars sail boat.
Speaker 1: By the way, it washes off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Speaker 1: They break the mast and essentially they had no boat
Speaker 1: to sail. So we did some group dynamic stuff with them.
Speaker 1: So talk to Jimmy Spihill and he says, the problem
Speaker 1: is is in there they'll have microphones and all can talk.
Speaker 1: We went from a five person team, so five voices
Speaker 1: to eleven voices, and we're having problems. So what did
Speaker 1: they do. They took microphones off of five of the
Speaker 1: guys on the boat, so there only could be six voices.
Speaker 1: How do they make that decision? Well, you'd have to
Speaker 1: if you run the bow, you'd have to say to
Speaker 1: the guy next to them, tell him blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: So there wouldn't be too much to coordinate. So I
Speaker 1: thought that was a really interesting solution. There's also another
Speaker 1: story in our book where the US Marines and at
Speaker 1: the very begining of World War two moved from five
Speaker 1: person or four person fire teams to twelve person fire
Speaker 1: teams and had terrible problems in the death rate went
Speaker 1: way up too. So there's there's other examples too. That's great,
Speaker 1: you hadn't yet sell boat, but the great great examples. Hey,
Speaker 1: so why is why was George Carlin Wright? Oh, George Colin?
Speaker 1: I also got that George Colin rules. So this is
Speaker 1: this comes from a book project Hogey Row and I've
Speaker 1: been working on forever, and we're sort of interested in
Speaker 1: the notion that very often in organizations, they they suffer
Speaker 1: from addition sickness, where more and more stuff gets added,
Speaker 1: more and more rules, more and more things, and nothing
Speaker 1: ever gets subtracted. So one of the cause is this
Speaker 1: is this is the from a George Carlin skit of
Speaker 1: this addition sid this or sort of tragedy of the
Speaker 1: commons when it comes to rules and procedures is it's
Speaker 1: essentially that my stuff or my ship is stuff, Your
Speaker 1: stuff is shit. So what that means is that everything
Speaker 1: that I add is good. So everybody has like this
Speaker 1: incentive to add stuff since my since my ship is
Speaker 1: stuff and your stuff is shit. And where you really
Speaker 1: see this And there's some organizations I'm working with. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of Apple right before Steve Jobs took over is
Speaker 1: a really good example. They had a huge number of
Speaker 1: products like that had something like that, twenty seven different
Speaker 1: max for example. And what happened from a power standpoint
Speaker 1: is that they were kind of organizations where people could
Speaker 1: in groups, could have enough power to add a new Mac,
Speaker 1: but nobody had the power to subtract. So that's where
Speaker 1: you sort of end up with this tragedy of complexity
Speaker 1: that actually confuses customers and cost the organization money and
Speaker 1: causes a bunch of internal conflict in the organization. So
Speaker 1: what did Jobs do? He came in with a year,
Speaker 1: He got rid of all the products and he introduced
Speaker 1: four So that was sort of like Jobs sort of
Speaker 1: a subtle guy. Yeah, that was a meditation, simplicity vibe
Speaker 1: that he brought to that table. Yeah, yeah, subtraction minimalism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: minimalism saved Apple. Yeah, Yeah, that's great. I love that. Okay,
Speaker 1: this one is interesting nine because especially because I've been
Speaker 1: really deeply entrenched in Masso's hierarchy of needs, wrote are
Speaker 1: you ready for hierarchy is good? Hierarchy is essential, unless
Speaker 1: isn't always better? Might you just elaborate a bit on that? Well? Well, so, so,
Speaker 1: first of all, this comes from an essay that I
Speaker 1: wrote where I made really clear that I hated hierarchy
Speaker 1: of bureaucracy and was raised by my father to really
Speaker 1: hate it. And then I went to Berkeley and protested
Speaker 1: and like, I just hate the theory. But then I
Speaker 1: started learning about organizations, and essentially there's a number of papers,
Speaker 1: including by my colleague Laura Tetons and other psychologists, that
Speaker 1: essentially shows that you can't find human groups or even
Speaker 1: animal groups that don't have a pecking order, and then
Speaker 1: when you tried, when you try to remove the pecking order,
Speaker 1: they end up fighting like crazy until they get a
Speaker 1: pecking order. So and and and people might start talking
Speaker 1: about things like Zappos and adhocracy, Well that's actually a
Speaker 1: hierarchy of circles and they had a CEO and pose
Speaker 1: it on them, Or they might say, what about open
Speaker 1: source software? If you look at like something like Mozilla,
Speaker 1: there's actually benevolent dictators who decide what ultimately goes in
Speaker 1: the code base, and there's a whole hierarchy of of
Speaker 1: people and so so the problem is that it seems
Speaker 1: to be impossible to organize human or animal groups with
Speaker 1: without some kind of pecking order. What about like communes, Oh,
Speaker 1: there's always status differences like that, and that that's what
Speaker 1: that's that's what Lara's paper is. When you go into
Speaker 1: any situations, there's not supposed to be a pecking order.
Speaker 1: There's people get more talking time, people get more goodies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what about communism? How did that like? Like that? Like
Speaker 1: there's always like the people in the party have more
Speaker 1: status and goodies than everybody else. Now, I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that that we shouldn't reduce status differences as much as possible,
Speaker 1: And we have an enormous amount of evidence that too
Speaker 1: many layers, too many status differences do all sorts of
Speaker 1: damage and and so so I'm all for making organizations,
Speaker 1: if you will, as to de emphasize status differences as
Speaker 1: much as possible. But but but there almost always has
Speaker 1: to be somebody who has some decision authority at certain times.
Speaker 1: For example, when you need to move fast. And and
Speaker 1: is my my uh beloved late dissertation advisor used to say,
Speaker 1: the most reliable way to reduce international warfare in conflict
Speaker 1: is to have some entity with more power come in
Speaker 1: and sort of get them to stop so so so
Speaker 1: so and and and there are other ways to reduce
Speaker 1: the need to have authority and stuff. But but the
Speaker 1: fact is, I don't know how to organize a social
Speaker 1: system of any kind without some status and power differences,
Speaker 1: as bad as they turn out to be. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's not always necessarily bad, right. You can have certain
Speaker 1: arrangements that are of a hierarchy that that are good
Speaker 1: and positive, right, Yeah, yeah, if if there's participation, if
Speaker 1: people well what one is so so so so. I
Speaker 1: there's some other research on the best leaders flex hierarchy.
Speaker 1: So what what they'll do is when they so they
Speaker 1: officially when they don't have expertise, they're really good. This
Speaker 1: is sort of like knowing the people work for you.
Speaker 1: They're really good at shutting up and and sort of
Speaker 1: calling on the person has more expertise and flexing the
Speaker 1: hierarchy and make that person the highest status person in
Speaker 1: the room. Until we're done with this decision because you
Speaker 1: know more than me, and to me, that's what it's
Speaker 1: sort of. That's what great leaders and people of power
Speaker 1: do is they know when to surrender power temporarily and
Speaker 1: go to even or even below power. And then they
Speaker 1: also have the power to stop the person. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know who who is the the the expert in
Speaker 1: plastics but knows nothing about manufacturing to uh, to shut
Speaker 1: up when the manufacturing conversation comes up. I love that.
Speaker 1: So that that makes so much sense to having a
Speaker 1: flexible hierarchy. You know where you you're you're willing to
Speaker 1: to shift and contextually based on what's the best for
Speaker 1: the best for the larger hole. And then there's there's
Speaker 1: some evidence by the way that this is how the
Speaker 1: most effective startups operate makes sense. Is so yeah, I
Speaker 1: love it. I love it. If I ever was a leader,
Speaker 1: that's what I would want to do, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Number ten. Uh, I know you you kind of said
Speaker 1: you're done with the asshole stuff, but number ten brings
Speaker 1: you back to your roots in a way. I'm never done, right,
Speaker 1: that's that. That was like my fourth book. But I'll
Speaker 1: always be the asshole guy. I accept that. Well, it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's like, you know the Beatles, like play
Speaker 1: your play the song, you know the Strawberry Fields. You know, like, okay,
Speaker 1: number this track, the asshole track number ten. If you
Speaker 1: are a winner and an asshole, you're still a loser
Speaker 1: in my book, because you are harming so many other
Speaker 1: people and you're lost to build something, make money, or
Speaker 1: dominate that competition. That one, I gotta admit, Bob, that
Speaker 1: one sounded very personal to you. That is personal. Well,
Speaker 1: so yeah, Elon Musk might be an example of this.
Speaker 1: By the way, I want to pick somebody who's immediately
Speaker 1: but but he's an asshole. Uh, there's nobody I know
Speaker 1: who worked with him who doesn't think he's an asshole.
Speaker 1: Like I want to find somebody who knows him well
Speaker 1: who doesn't think he's an ass And and by the way, jobs,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people with jobs who thinks he
Speaker 1: wasn't an asshole, especially later in life. So so right,
Speaker 1: although he's younger, who knows. But but to go back,
Speaker 1: if we go to the weight of the behavioral science literature,
Speaker 1: let's just go to the weight of the behavioral science
Speaker 1: literature that if you're somebody who who somehow or another
Speaker 1: leaves people feeling demean de energized, exploited. You sort of
Speaker 1: pick your flavor of assholeness that that that it has
Speaker 1: negative effect effect on their well being, It has negative
Speaker 1: effect actually on their performance, it has negative effect on
Speaker 1: their family life, on their creativity, on their like. It's
Speaker 1: really really hard if you start just doing a general
Speaker 1: Google search, and I did this for my uh what
Speaker 1: I hopefully is my last asshole book seventeen, The Asshole
Speaker 1: Survival Guide. But actually looking at the behavioral science literature
Speaker 1: and finding something good about treating people like dirt and
Speaker 1: leaving them feeling disrespected, you may succeed. Anyways. Well, I'll
Speaker 1: say the one good thing about is that if you're
Speaker 1: in a zero sum game, it may help you get
Speaker 1: ahead by demeaning and humiliating people and making others feel
Speaker 1: like dirt. This might be why Michael Jordan. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons Michael Jordan was successful is he just intimidated
Speaker 1: everybody so much. So in a zero sum game, it
Speaker 1: might help you get ahead. But if you actually care
Speaker 1: about the fellow human beings around you, in their mental health,
Speaker 1: their families, their physical health, and even their performance, it's
Speaker 1: hard to find anything good. You know, assholes love saying
Speaker 1: assholes finish first. They love saying that. You know, that phrase,
Speaker 1: the phrase assholes finish first, But it sounds like you're saying,
Speaker 1: you know, what finish what game? What game are we finishing?
Speaker 1: You know, And you're like, I wouldn't even say that
Speaker 1: you're winning if if you win based on that motivation, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it depends. And then and then our friend Adam Grant,
Speaker 1: we're talking about Adam grand who we love. So Adam
Speaker 1: is like he's got a pretty strong evidence based case
Speaker 1: that that that that that essentially people are takers, which
Speaker 1: would be one flavor of asshole if you will that
Speaker 1: that that takers will sometimes do better in the short term.
Speaker 1: They sometimes are able to support people, to exploit people
Speaker 1: in sort of short term zero sum games, but if
Speaker 1: it's a long term game, they tend to do better
Speaker 1: and to do good for other people along the way.
Speaker 1: So I can show situations where I'm consistently treating other
Speaker 1: people like dirt might help you get ahead, but they're
Speaker 1: pretty ugly situations. And to talk about exceptions that there
Speaker 1: are it depends what you mean by an asshole, But
Speaker 1: there are times when losing your temper. Treating other people
Speaker 1: like dirt may work in the short term and may
Speaker 1: not be a good idea. And one of the examples,
Speaker 1: and so one of my dear friends and favorite psychologist,
Speaker 1: Barry Staw, had this paper that was around literally for
Speaker 1: decades and finally thinks, think to another psychologist, Katie Dessel,
Speaker 1: got to publish in journal Applied Psychology, and what they
Speaker 1: showed to oversimplify as much as possible that basketball coaches,
Speaker 1: high school college basketball coaches who have temper tantruments and
Speaker 1: get pissed off and yell at the players at halftime,
Speaker 1: that if they do it all the time, it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: and if they never do it, it doesn't work. But
Speaker 1: the best coaches who occasionally lose their temper and yell
Speaker 1: at their teams, that that seems to work. Because the
Speaker 1: explanation seems to be when somebody yells at you who
Speaker 1: almost never yells at you, you tend to say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's probably not them, it's probably me, because they don't
Speaker 1: usually act like that. So you tend to make make
Speaker 1: an attribution that's yourself, not the situation. But if it's
Speaker 1: somebody who's an asshole who yells at you, every time
Speaker 1: you say, it's just an asshole doing asshole things. Isn't that?
Speaker 1: How like abusers do it though they are not assholes
Speaker 1: all the time, feel like abusers and relationships are like
Speaker 1: every now and then. I don't know. Well, so I
Speaker 1: do have the in the no asshole role. I have
Speaker 1: a guide if you want to be a successful asshole,
Speaker 1: and and and and and. One of them is not
Speaker 1: to be all asshole all the time, to be somewhat
Speaker 1: strategic about it. And then a second a second key
Speaker 1: one is to have somebody to clean up after you.
Speaker 1: A toxic handlers. There's sometimes called well our presence got
Speaker 1: a lot of those, by the way, I know. I
Speaker 1: was like, I'm not gonna go there, but I'll go.
Speaker 1: But he's got lots of them. He's got a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of people on his staff that that
Speaker 1: have those functions. Okay, Levin, I will have this one.
Speaker 1: I love it so much. I actually just tweeted it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you saw a couple of minutes ago,
Speaker 1: I tweeted this about how Kurt Vonnegut was right. It
Speaker 1: is often more constructive to tell yourself I have enough,
Speaker 1: then to keep asking how you can get more and
Speaker 1: more and more. I don't believe that people who die
Speaker 1: with the fast money, fancy stuff, power, prestige win the
Speaker 1: game of life. So tell a little bit about the
Speaker 1: about the Kurvaggett story, it's a very short story. So
Speaker 1: what happened was was very close to to Before he died,
Speaker 1: Kurt Vonnegat published a poem The New Yorker called Joe Heller,
Speaker 1: and essentially the punchline of the poem was Joe Heller
Speaker 1: and Kurt Vonnegatt were at some billionaire's house and Kurt
Speaker 1: Vonnegatt said something to him like to Joe Heller, something like,
Speaker 1: you know, he's made more money today than you had
Speaker 1: from all the sales of Catch twenty two. And Joe
Speaker 1: Heller said, but I've got something that he can never have,
Speaker 1: which is the knowledge that I have enough, and so
Speaker 1: to me and we're and so when I saw this poem,
Speaker 1: as I actually wrote Kurt Vonnegut like an old fashioned
Speaker 1: letter and asked for permission. He did, Yes, I can
Speaker 1: send you the postcard and asked for permission poem in
Speaker 1: my book. He responded with a personal postcard somewhere on
Speaker 1: my blog, a personal postcard in which he said, I
Speaker 1: had basically unlimited rights to use the poem for whatever
Speaker 1: I want. So that was that was one. I'll send
Speaker 1: you a copy of it later. That was one of
Speaker 1: my great most exciting moments. So so anyhow, so it
Speaker 1: comes from this, this this poem, and it appeared that
Speaker 1: people who never have enough, like they never have enough power,
Speaker 1: they never have have enough sex, like they just all
Speaker 1: And in fact, that's what the title of kind of
Speaker 1: like the new book by Donald Trump's nieces about, isn't it.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's it's sort of that's that's sort
Speaker 1: of the what's the title of that book? Too much
Speaker 1: and never enough or something too much and never enough
Speaker 1: just that striving, I mean I never enough status, I
Speaker 1: never enough beautiful women, I mean all that, I never
Speaker 1: have enough money. I just want to crush you more
Speaker 1: and more. Yeah, I really loved that, uh that story,
Speaker 1: that Kravan Gonna Get story. It was the first time
Speaker 1: I came across it, and it was very exciting because
Speaker 1: I've been just thinking so much about that lately, about
Speaker 1: how that's just like the secret of contentment. It's there's
Speaker 1: just no way around it. And it also is on
Speaker 1: the other side of it of never having enough. It's
Speaker 1: it's one of the things that fuels these just crazy
Speaker 1: status and power differences, just that sort of lust for more,
Speaker 1: like how much do you need? Yeah, it's like with wine,
Speaker 1: l like like like I kind of got obsessed with
Speaker 1: wine and started drinking like these hundred dollars wines, and
Speaker 1: the thing I sort of figured out, so there's not
Speaker 1: that big a difference between like a good twenty dollars
Speaker 1: wine and a good two undred dollars wine. And now
Speaker 1: it's like, now my contest as are fine as many
Speaker 1: wines under twenty dollars are as good as possible. And I,
Speaker 1: honestly I can't tell the difference. And I had I
Speaker 1: drank a lot of really expensive wines to figure that out.
Speaker 1: I've never tried it. I've never tried like a billion
Speaker 1: dollar wine before. Now maybe two drede not a lot
Speaker 1: of them that much money. I may have done a
Speaker 1: two hundred bottle glass. I'm trying to remember. But anyway,
Speaker 1: you know, these wine experts will will swear there's such
Speaker 1: subtle differences. You know, the wine tasters have this special tongue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the special time. Yes, Okay, twelve, we're back to your
Speaker 1: your greatest hits. If you were plagued by an asshole
Speaker 1: or a pack of them, ovey a pack of them,
Speaker 1: make a clean getaway if you can. If you can't
Speaker 1: develop a strategy, this is just fun out of a
Speaker 1: line weapons. If you can't develop a strategy for protecting
Speaker 1: yourself and fell victims from the onslaught, for preserving your
Speaker 1: dagny and spirit, and for fighting back, how can you
Speaker 1: get away sometimes when they're so persuasive. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot to unpack here. In some ways
Speaker 1: this is I think that was a case of me
Speaker 1: trying to have an overly long summary of all the
Speaker 1: ideas in a book, which is The Asshole Survival Guide.
Speaker 1: But essentially there's a lot of situations where people wait
Speaker 1: too long. And this is like abusive relationships you were
Speaker 1: talking about too and they just keep taking it and
Speaker 1: taking it. And I mean, all the evidence is is
Speaker 1: that once you leave, you're much better off. And this
Speaker 1: notion that people quit bosses not organizations is very well
Speaker 1: documented and it is true. And then I do talk
Speaker 1: about the notion that there are times when you can't
Speaker 1: get away, and there are different things you can do
Speaker 1: to reduce the amount of stress you have. One is
Speaker 1: you can distance yourself sort of just like the kryptonite.
Speaker 1: Second one is probably more cognitive behavioral therapy type stuff,
Speaker 1: laughing at it, minimizing the threat, intellectualizing. And then I
Speaker 1: guess sort of last, but not least, is that there
Speaker 1: are times when you can fight back. And Gretchen Carlson
Speaker 1: versus Roger Ales might be the perfect example. So you
Speaker 1: do two things. You document and you get allies. If
Speaker 1: you recall, your listeners will recall. Gretchen Carlson was sexually
Speaker 1: harassed by Roger Ales. She brought it in her iPhone
Speaker 1: and recorded him hitting on her repeatedly, for example, and
Speaker 1: making bad comments. But dealing with him it's you know,
Speaker 1: I wrote a book about it. But when I've got
Speaker 1: when I've got to asso on my life, it's not
Speaker 1: like it's easy to figure out how to survive this.
Speaker 1: It's like any other abusive relationship. It's not easy. Pop.
Speaker 1: I have a maybe a little bit of a tangential question,
Speaker 1: but how do you know you're not the asshole? And
Speaker 1: not you by the way, not Bob Sutten, but I'm
Speaker 1: saying in general because I've noticed in my experience that
Speaker 1: most most people I think their assholes, they actually think
Speaker 1: that the other person's the asshole. Yeah, they don't think
Speaker 1: by the asshole. So that's I don't think it's a
Speaker 1: tangential a tangential question, and the evidence actually supports it.
Speaker 1: If you look at some reasonable national surveys of a
Speaker 1: book workplace bullying, and it's something like about fifty percent
Speaker 1: of Americans report that they have either observed or been
Speaker 1: victim of ongoing abuse in something like a half a
Speaker 1: percent of Americans say they've been the person doing it.
Speaker 1: So those numbers, those numbers don't don't add up. And
Speaker 1: as you would know, there's all sorts of self serving
Speaker 1: attributions where people will do it. And I mean, and
Speaker 1: so I end the first chapter of the Asshole Survival
Speaker 1: Guide by sort of saying, because it's a small way
Speaker 1: to reduce the biases, to be slow to label other
Speaker 1: people as asshole, and to be fast to label yourself.
Speaker 1: And then I talk about various elements. Probably the best
Speaker 1: thing you can have in your life, this gets to
Speaker 1: psychological safety, is to have somebody in your life who
Speaker 1: will tell you the truth when you've been a jerk.
Speaker 1: And the example that I use towards the end of
Speaker 1: The Asshole Survival Guide is Clementine Churchill, who was Winston's wife.
Speaker 1: That was apparently apparently he could be pretty nasty, and
Speaker 1: that was one of her jobs was to tell him
Speaker 1: when he's he'd been an asshole and sort of been.
Speaker 1: Nineteen forty or so, when the blitz was hitting London
Speaker 1: and the obvious was under a lot of stress, she
Speaker 1: wrote him a famous letter where she basically told him,
Speaker 1: you're being a jerk. They're afraid of you, and you're
Speaker 1: not getting the best out of them. You've got to
Speaker 1: stop being so nasty Winston. She'd put them more elegantly
Speaker 1: than that, but the idea of having someone in your life.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you go back to the
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs story, people who know him well, like Ed Catmill,
Speaker 1: who's in a group that we're part of who has
Speaker 1: had a Pixar for twenty five years, they will tell
Speaker 1: you that one of the reasons that Jobs actually became
Speaker 1: better the last decade of his life was that he
Speaker 1: had a guy named Bill Campbell, who's known as the
Speaker 1: coach in Silicon Valley, the late Bill Campbell, who would
Speaker 1: pull Steve aside and tell him when he'd blown it.
Speaker 1: Who's Steve respected. Well, this seems to early to your
Speaker 1: coach example with you know the person who every now
Speaker 1: and then yells at you you listen, yep, yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: because you know they love you most of the time
Speaker 1: at least. Yes. Yeah. Well, well Bill Kimball would yell.
Speaker 1: He'd kind of tease you and swear at you and
Speaker 1: tell you love you and give you a big higu
Speaker 1: as that kind of guy. He was an institution in
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. He coached almost all of the major teams.
Speaker 1: And by the way, he didn't ask for money. I
Speaker 1: mean he was CEO of into it and was independently
Speaker 1: wealthy and was on the board. He just did it
Speaker 1: because he kind of loved doing it. That's cool. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to think of what Carl Rodgers would say about this,
Speaker 1: because he was all into like unconditional positive guard Maybe
Speaker 1: you know, you can still have positive regard for someone,
Speaker 1: but tell them that they've they've been n asshole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's I love you and I love you no
Speaker 1: matter what. But it would be better for you and
Speaker 1: those around you if you did blank. Isn't that love? Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean that's love. Yeah, that is love. That's great,
Speaker 1: It's really great. Number thirteen, Am I a successor or
Speaker 1: a failure? Is that a success or a failure is
Speaker 1: not success or a failure? Gotcha? I had successor without
Speaker 1: any space between success and the word or am I
Speaker 1: a success or failure? Is not a very useful question.
Speaker 1: It is better to ask what am I learning? So
Speaker 1: this is this is actually from Carl Wyke and also
Speaker 1: the originally the folks who did the origin, the original
Speaker 1: Hawthorne studies, famous psychological studies. The reason it's not a
Speaker 1: very useful question sort of following you know one of
Speaker 1: my heroes, Carl Wyke, is that is that essentially that
Speaker 1: sort of focusing on the end state, and most things
Speaker 1: in life are part success and part failure. And if
Speaker 1: you think you're, oh, I'm a loser, I'm a loser.
Speaker 1: That tends to demotivate you. If you think I'm a winner,
Speaker 1: you think that I'm really smart, And neither one of
Speaker 1: those are very conducive to learning. And the best question,
Speaker 1: the best question is what what am I doing right?
Speaker 1: What am I doing wrong? And to keep asking yourself
Speaker 1: that as you go, as you go through life, because
Speaker 1: focusing on whether I'm a loser or winner. Is it's
Speaker 1: not very useful emotionally. One leads to arrogance, the other one.
Speaker 1: The other one leads to kind of depression. And and
Speaker 1: and focusing on what I am learning is more useful.
Speaker 1: And and I'd actually add a footnote to that that
Speaker 1: that in Silicon Valley, and we even do this with companies,
Speaker 1: will celebrate failures. I actually don't like failure. I think
Speaker 1: that it sucks. I think that I get depressed when
Speaker 1: I get when I fail. I feel bad even when
Speaker 1: my enemies fail, because it hurts. But but nonetheless, we
Speaker 1: all know that it's more useful to focus on what
Speaker 1: we're learning for ourselves and to others, and to move forward.
Speaker 1: And this is another sort of car White thing. It's
Speaker 1: just really true. Yeah, it's it's also it feels very
Speaker 1: Carol Delkish. Oh yes, yeah, yes, it's a growth mindset. Four.
Speaker 1: Team life is always going to be a bit messy,
Speaker 1: especially if you're doing something interesting and new. Try to
Speaker 1: create as much simplicity and clarity as you can, but
Speaker 1: embrace and enjoy inevitable confusion and messiness too. During COVID,
Speaker 1: how does this apply? Ooh well, COVID is an extreme
Speaker 1: example of this, isn't it Yeah? So I mean I
Speaker 1: said this long before COVID, and I guess COVID is
Speaker 1: an extreme case. But every situation, I know, when you
Speaker 1: sort of look back or even you're there, when people
Speaker 1: are doing great stuff like Google sort of growing like crazy,
Speaker 1: I have the most successful sports teams, whatever, if you
Speaker 1: actually talk to people who are there who tell you
Speaker 1: the truth instead of the Sanitai story picks the growth
Speaker 1: of Pixar, for example, which is wildly successful, and you
Speaker 1: ma company, it's almost every day it almost always feels
Speaker 1: messy and difficult. And where I learned this was from
Speaker 1: my friend David Kelly, who grew very successful company IDEO
Speaker 1: started the Stanford d School that I'm part of. When
Speaker 1: you go to David and you complain and say things
Speaker 1: are all screwed up, he essentially says, if you're doing
Speaker 1: something important and new, you're going to be confused much
Speaker 1: of the time, and you kind of got to deal
Speaker 1: with it and move forward and do the best you can.
Speaker 1: But it's never going to be beautiful and linear and clean.
Speaker 1: And to me, that's what leadership and being part of
Speaker 1: some part of life is about. I guess to go
Speaker 1: to go to COVID. None of the solutions are going
Speaker 1: to be easy or clean. There's going to be a
Speaker 1: lot of failure. And I actually think that I'm seeing
Speaker 1: some intelligence around this that the number of organizations throughout
Speaker 1: the world are you that are doing different vaccine and
Speaker 1: treatment programs and assuming most are going to fail, and
Speaker 1: that's just a mess that's necessary to get through this process.
Speaker 1: And so you can't be upset when there's there's setbacks. Now,
Speaker 1: I think where I get upset is when there's a
Speaker 1: lack of wisdom to go back to some of the
Speaker 1: early ones where people have strong opinions, strongly hell or
Speaker 1: that they can't have constructive conflict. I think that's where
Speaker 1: we get in trouble. Yeah, that's a great distinction. That's
Speaker 1: a great distinction in general, that that whole point fourteen
Speaker 1: feels very Zen Buddhist to me or stoic the stoic. Wow,
Speaker 1: I guess it, I guess it is. I guess I
Speaker 1: guess that it is. So what's that book of Zen
Speaker 1: and the Art of Archery? I bet you know that
Speaker 1: in the Art of the Motorcycle man? Oh yeah, but
Speaker 1: the Zen and the Art Archery? I forgot to run
Speaker 1: the point. The point was you don't focus on the end.
Speaker 1: You just focus on the process of how you string
Speaker 1: the bow, yes, how you put the arrow on, how
Speaker 1: you pick the arrow, how you draw back. You don't
Speaker 1: think about hitting the target. You sort of focus on
Speaker 1: the on, the on, the on, the process, and and
Speaker 1: was ar tree is a pretty clean sort of operation
Speaker 1: compared to the mess of COVID, where everything's just all
Speaker 1: screwed up all the time, and in lesser ways just
Speaker 1: doing a startup word like, there's always major problems. Indeed,
Speaker 1: number fifteen this is our last one. So this is
Speaker 1: our triumphant. Oh, I can't believe we made it. I've
Speaker 1: never gone I've never done all fifteen ever, by the way,
Speaker 1: I usually do ten in my class. Well, this is
Speaker 1: this is the monumental podcast chat. I really like fifteen
Speaker 1: because well it has to do with racing sailboats, so
Speaker 1: I like it. Jimmy Maloney was right, work is an
Speaker 1: overrated activity. And this kind of circles back to how
Speaker 1: we started, you know, this conversation. So so the reason
Speaker 1: I have number fifteen just philosophically, and I did mention
Speaker 1: this at the outset, is that I were going to
Speaker 1: setting Stanford University. It is so work focused, so achievement focused,
Speaker 1: so capitalist focus that that that I and my students
Speaker 1: and they're not all like this, but it's so much
Speaker 1: in the air that it's sort of a problem and
Speaker 1: we're and even you know, and even when people want
Speaker 1: to go into nonprofits and education, they've worked as a
Speaker 1: solution to everything. So anyways, so I used to raise sailboats.
Speaker 1: And this was kind of in the nineties, especially with
Speaker 1: my lifelong friend Jimmy Maloney, and we raised this two
Speaker 1: person boat and we had to call a five or
Speaker 1: five and and every weekend and he had a kind
Speaker 1: of crummy dob essentially doing nasty finance in real estate,
Speaker 1: and every weekend he'd say work socks works over rated,
Speaker 1: Work socks works overrated. And of course people say stuff
Speaker 1: like that all the time. But then one day, Jimmy
Speaker 1: and his wife Loretta, they sell their house. They sold
Speaker 1: their house for about a million dollars, which is it's
Speaker 1: a fair amount of money, but not that much money.
Speaker 1: They bought a sailboat. They pulled their three kids out
Speaker 1: of school, who are probably seven, nine, and twelve then
Speaker 1: something like that, and they cruise the Pacific Ocean for
Speaker 1: about two and a half years, and then they ended
Speaker 1: up in New Zealand, which seems even smarter than it
Speaker 1: did at the time. And they so they quit their
Speaker 1: jobs and they do a little work, like Loretta, who
Speaker 1: is a school teacher, would do a little substitute teaching.
Speaker 1: Jimmy would work one or two days in the tablets,
Speaker 1: but they mostly just focus on raising their kids and
Speaker 1: sailing and the upshot which actually even since I wrote
Speaker 1: that has changed in different ways. Was so they raised
Speaker 1: their three kids. The oldest one, Jimmy has becomes a
Speaker 1: professional sailor. The other two become two of the best
Speaker 1: sailors in New Zealand, and New Zealand's has the best
Speaker 1: sailors in the world. And to give you evidence, there
Speaker 1: are there are twelve members. Last time I looked of
Speaker 1: the New Zealand Olympic team for whatever the next Olympics is.
Speaker 1: One is one is his his his daughter Alex, who
Speaker 1: already has won a silver medal, and the other one
Speaker 1: is his son Andy in the single headed boat, who's
Speaker 1: already won the America's Cup as a crew member. So
Speaker 1: those are the kids that he raised. The in some ways,
Speaker 1: it bothers me a little bit. There's so much achievement
Speaker 1: that's come out of this, so maybe a little bit
Speaker 1: too much achievement. But it used to just be that
Speaker 1: they just blew it off. In the last couple of
Speaker 1: times I've talked to Jimmy and the Redham, they really
Speaker 1: are much happier than most people I know. I love that.
Speaker 1: I love kind of ending on that, not the peak,
Speaker 1: but the plateau. Maslow talked about the plateau experience, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, finding the miraculous in the every day, you know,
Speaker 1: as opposed to everything having to be this big peak,
Speaker 1: you know, like I reached the top of the mountain
Speaker 1: all the time. Yeah, so in the miraculous and the
Speaker 1: other day. Just something about Jimmy since I sailed with
Speaker 1: him in a long time, Yeah, he loved I guess
Speaker 1: you would call it a flow experience too. One of
Speaker 1: the problems we had competitively was, and he's obviously a
Speaker 1: good sailor when championships and he raised all these champions
Speaker 1: is when the boat felt really great and we're going straight,
Speaker 1: even was the wrong direction in a race, he just
Speaker 1: get into the grooves so much. He just that was
Speaker 1: his favorite part of sailing, which was pretty good when
Speaker 1: he got ocean into that boat, just going for days
Speaker 1: in one direction and it felt really great. So that's
Speaker 1: just kind of how Jimmy always thought to though. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to be in that. What would you call that?
Speaker 1: We just feel so good and so simple. I think flow.
Speaker 1: I think flow is inadequate phrase for that, or even
Speaker 1: me I Maslow's notion of well, it could be a
Speaker 1: peak experience as well. Yeah, that's beautiful, Bob. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for cheting with me today about something that's
Speaker 1: not entirely about assholes, and you know, a broader framework,
Speaker 1: a broader framework for your life and offering us our wisdom. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you, Scott. It's a delight to talk to you.
Speaker 1: It's a delight to talk to a fellow psychologist. And
Speaker 1: this is the first interview I've ever given, and I
Speaker 1: do a lot of interviews actually where somebody asked me
Speaker 1: about about this set of things I believe. So it
Speaker 1: was really fun, and that was you didn't really get
Speaker 1: canned answers for me because I actually had to think
Speaker 1: about this stuff you asked. So thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening to this episode. Out of the Psychology podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in on the
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