Robert Sutton || Good Leaders vs. Bad Leaders

It's great to have Robert Sutten on the podcast. Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and Professor of Organizational Behavior by courtesy at Stanford. He co founded the Stanford Technology Ventures Program STVP and the Hasso Platner Institute of Design, which everyone calls the D School. Sutton received his PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan and has served on the Stanford faculty since nineteen eighty three.

He's a senior scientist at Gallop and academic director of two executive education programs, Customer Focused Innovation and the Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate. He has served as professor at the host Business School, a fellow at the Center for Advanced study in the Behavioral Sciences, a fellow at IDEO, an advisor to McKenzie and Company, and faculty at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Wow, Robert Sudden is so great to chat with you today. It's great. I'm just

it's just because I'm so old. That's what happens. There are a lot of old people who don't do one fiftieth of that. But thank you. Yeah. No, it's really obviously impressive but interesting to see you dive into so many different elements. And I'm curious and we'll talk about Well, I let me all start off by asking you, do you see a main thread that we've through a lot most of this work, Well, I don't know. Looking for

consistency is always a bit of bullshit. But still I'm an organizational psychologist, which I think is the most important thing about me. I was a psychology major for eleven years. I like you, that's all. And then I became an engineering professor, which is still completely bewildering after thirty seven years. But if I would say the thing that really goes back to my education for my mentor Robert Kahn, that what I think about is the interplay between the individual

and the organization. That's what I'm always thinking about, is is there sort of this individual has these psychological tools and limits and biases and so on, and abilities to of course, you very much into abilities, but then there's the constraints of the social system which both constrains them, and there's also a human construction too, So always the interplay between the organization and the person. That's always kind of how I think I can't help. That's great that

you're thinking along those lines. I don't think every organization thinks along those lines, right, I Mean a lot of organizations will completely ignore the basic needs of the people working there and thinking that, well, we just tell them what the mission is, they'll they'll go for it. Oh yeah, yeah, if we just tell people, they'll do it, right, even though even though the smart ones realized you that might be stupid to do what I'm told, huh, or self

destructive or give me a reason. Yeah. Well, are you familiar with McGregor's distinction between theory X and theory Y. Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Famous. Yeah. People are evil, people are good, and then you design a completely different organization. Yeah. McGregor was like one of those people. I was raised with early theory edges legend right, and so many people are not aware of. Abraham Maslow came around and he posited a theory Z. Did you know about his theory? Z?

Theory Z is so whenever I talk to organization psychologies, they haven't heard of that, And so I feel so excited that I a chance to, like, I'm excited to tell people that. So Masol read the writings of McGregor, and of course McGregor cited Masil a lot. They were both in the same generation, right, But Mazill's like, I don't think he went I don't think McGregor went far enough. So theory acts. So theory through why is essentially the

self actualized person, the person who's doing good work. But Maxwell's and I think that that we need like room for the transcenders and that's what he called theories those who were motivated by higher values outside of themselves as well as these peak experiences in life. And yeah, and he wrote a paper on that, and maybe people don't know about so yeah, kind of it kind of sounds like, you know, it's another probably the most famous living organizational psychologist. Now,

I'm our friend Adam Grant. I mean, at Adam, that's what being a giver is about. It's not just about taking care of yourself and me, me, me, it's being a giver A little bit of that there. Yeah. I remember I actually talked to at him when I was working on my book and tone about theory Z and he was super interested in, Yeah, well, should we dive

into this really interesting article of yours fifteen things? I believe sure, And because there's a lot of ground to cover there, and there's so much to think about, and You'll have like one sentence and then I'm like, whoa, I'm going to spend my whole day about one sentence. So first of all, tell me how you came about this list of twelve things. You said it was an ending ritual, It came out of an ending with yeah. Yeah.

So I've been teaching, you know, the first time I ever taught Introduction Organizational Behavior, I now realize, was in nineteen eighty at this at the at the University of Michigan School of Business. I've been teaching this class a long time and I got paid three hundred and twenty five dollars a month to do it the first time I did it too, and so anyways, So so I've been was that good? Was that good money for academic nineteen? Well it was, it was, you know, it was enough

to live in ann Arbor in the early eighties. Was it sort of like the last day? I never quite know what to say, you know, it's like the final like and in people. And I used to say, ah, people don't need closure, but I think we actually all do need closure. So what I started doing was I came up with there was twelve things I believe, ten things I believe about leadership that were sort of just a way so we can have some closure. And typically what I do and still do and I fus with it.

Sometimes I do ten, sometimes I do fifteen. They're always sort of changing in and out. But I tried to bring in some concepts from the course, some new concepts I haven't thought about before. And then as we'll probably get to I kind of end by saying, well, you know, we've been talking about work all week, and Stanford is one of the most work focused places I've ever been in my life. Capitalism, capitalism, money, me, me me, career, career, career,

that's kind of Stanford is. You know, work is kind of overrated, So we kind of end on that and so, yeah, it was just a little ritual and people seem to appreciate it, so I kept doing it. Yeah, I love that the work is overrated. One. We didn't get there yet, but that's one of your things in the list. I love that. So okay, let's start with number one. Sometimes the best management is no management at all. First, do

no harm. Why is that? So? There is this tendency, you know, and some people are more prone to it than others who are leaders, to get in people's face and to push them into micromanage them. And there are situations where you do need to give guidance, you do need to correct people, and you lead. But in fact there's two bits of evidence that show that it's a bad There are bad times to get in people's face.

As the first one. My co author and friend Jeff Feffer has done a bunch of lab studies with Childini actually the famous influence guy, that show that the harder managers work on micromanaging, the more input they give, the more advice they give, the better they think they're work. The subordinates do independently of the quality of the work of their subordinates, because it's just this effort justification thing. Okay.

And then and then another twist is, at least my reading of research on creativity, which you've done all sorts of wonderful stuff on creativity, is that the more guidance you give people, the more closely you evaluate them, because they're afraid to screw up in front of the boss, the more likely they're to use tried and true solutions. So I sort of think of of of, if you will management a little bit like surgery or medicine, which is first, do no harm. So that's so that's sort

of one that I like to start. Wait, that's that you just blew my mind. Okay. So their programs there there, you know, courses introduction organizational management. So what would you here's just a thought experiment, what would you relabel that course? Oh? I don't know, it's sort of like management, something like like like like when to get in their face and when to get out of the way. Because that in fact,

Frank Flynn another kind of organizational psychologist at Stanford. He he's done all all this this research with Actually Dan Ames is a psychologist at n y U. As I recall that that that shows that the most important characteristic of a good leader is assertiveness. They know when to push people and they know when to back off. So and I'm not saying that managers should just let things go.

I'm not saying they're useless or unimportant, but but the bias is for them to get in people's face too much, and they got to be careful good. I like that. The same same rules seem to apply for sports coaches too. Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I really love that. Okay, Number two, the best leaders have the attitude of wisdom, the confidence to act in their convictions, and then humility to keep searching for and acting on evidence that they are wrong. Well, this is just basically stolen from a

Bazilian philosophers. And then and you're a psychologist, and the psychologist got in the wisdom business. And there's all these definitions psychologists. But the one I saw of like the like the most is this notion which futurists use too, is is that uh is have the confidence to act and the humility to think that you might be wrong. So in the futurist business, I was on the board

and to the future for a year. A few years they have this notion of them, Oh, they're crazy, They're they're such a there I can't believe they are a nonprofit consulting firm. They're so flaky. I love them. And and the idea that that that the best way to approach the future is to have strong opinions because then people know where you stand, and you can you know your ideas, I but weekly held, so you're kind of always looking for evidence that that you might be wrong.

And for leaderships. As we're talking about leadership, if you have a wishy, washy boss, nobody wants to follow them. Yeah, And and even I have a colleague, Kathy Eisenhardt, who's

been studying startups for forty years, probably the most. I think she's the most widely cited person in strategy, and some of her early research showed that the best way to run a startup was essentially whatever you were doing, whatever your strategy to do it, tell everybody was the way to do it until the moment you thought it was wrong, and then pivot to the new direction and say no, we're all going this way and then and that's kind of consistent with this idea of having strong

opinions weekly held because you kind of know where you're going, but you're always looking for signs you might be wrong. Let's go number three, because this one she had me thinking a lot about this one. Indifference is as important as passion on that one. Well, you know that I used to think this was sort of an original idea. But didn't somebody write a book called Guess We Can with a subtle heart of not giving a fuck. It's

sort of the same thing on my podcast. Yeah, Mark Man, I stole my idea, and I probably stolen somebody else so so. But the fact is, I think that if you care about everything and try to please everybody, well, two things that happens. You try to please everybody, you try to please no one and the and the second thing is is if you give your all to absolutely everything,

you end up burning out and doing nothing well. And by the way, I thought about replacing that, which is with something like everything worth doing is not worth doing well. In fact, somethings are worth doing badly that you have to do. I'll give you an example in my own life.

At Stanford every year they give us this really long form to fill out for our annual performance evaluation system, and it's really long, and apparently there's a really complicated algorithm to determine the raises of faculty, and it's really interesting. I even had to fill it out this year, and we're having no raises because we're having a freeze. And the thing that I figured out is there's no relationship between how much effort I put into that form and

the size of the rais I get. I just have to turn it in and then I get whatever the standard raise is. The only thing that determines the size of my rais is whether I get an external job off or otherwise I get like two percent. So why would I put a lot of effort into something where all I have to do is turn into form, no matter how crappy it looks. Yeah, what's the mass of quote? What's not worth doing? Is not worth doing well? He said the opposite, Yeah, he said, Well, he said it's

not worth doing? Is not worth doing well? Yeah? So yeah, what what do you make of Because we live in this moment where a lot of people are saying silence is bad, you know, an indication that you're you're part of the problem, if you're if you're being if you're indifferent to someone's cause, well, well, that's that's difference. I I I think that silence there's sometimes when you need to be silent to listen. But silence because of fear

is really a bad sign. And sometimes silence because of fear, of course is rational because there's some situations and you're powerless. When you speak out, you're going to get crushed or hurt or killed. I mean, we we know this, but but but to me, the notion in general that silence is not golden, I think on average is true, especially when you have silence by people have less power, because

that's almost always a bad sign. That's one of the main things I look for when I go into organizations and like just go to a meeting, is there's sort of the boss and everybody else in the room. If everybody's afraid to speak, and the only thing they do is kiss up to the boss and agree with the boss, we know whether things are bad, things are bad. Yeah, well, yeah,

that can apply to lots of situations. You know. I'm a real big fan of my friend Susan Keane's work, and what I really like about our work is because I'm more of a I like to think more before I talk. But I noticed that. I mean, there's so many people, especially on social media, who just like to talk. They like to talk like that's what they enjoy doing,

is talking right before thinking it's through. And how can we give more opportunities and encouragement to those who aren't the fast you know, the fast talkers, but even the fast thinkers. Well, of course you know Jeff Effer and I. I I can't remember what's on the list of fifteen we're even looking at today. But but Jeff effern I wrote about the smart talk trap in an American society and organizations, you often get your word for saying smart

things and not doing them. But to me, one of the things leaders can do, and I had a good department chair who named Peter Glynn, who did this is what they do is that they stifle the big mouth people like me, I talk too much. And what they do is they call them the introverts. They call them the people less power. And I can, just in my mind's eye, I can I have a picture of Peter Glynn going around the table with a twenty five or us SO tenure and tenured track faculty in my department,

the big mouse. The former chairs are all trying to talk like me the Okay, I wasn't thinking of you by the guilty I gotta I gotta own my weaknesses. And then there's people I think of my colleague how Lee, who's really smart but doesn't say very much. Call on how call on the new assistant professor, and the new assistant professor doesn't want to say anything, and then Peter kind of pulls them back stagency. We want to hear

from you your future. So so that to me, that's that's good leadership, is that you do reverse status status differences, you shut down the people who talk too much. So to me that that was really impressed about having Peter as a chair. Okay, so let's go uh number four. The best leaders know what it feels like to work for them. Tell me about that one. Well, so it's so it's a lot easier to manage other people's work, first of all, when you understand how they work, how

it happens. And then the other thing, and this is sort of that and I just I just saw I saw something about this with Fauci, the very controversial you know Fauci that are leading epidemiologists, that that that that that during I think was the last Sarrus crisis. That that that that he put on a mask and got in the room with people infected because he wouldn't ask people to do something he wouldn't do himself. That's wow,

that's that's that's what a dude. Man. But But but the other part, which this is an empathy thing, and and and you this comes in your work a lot, just the ConA kind of intelligences that you talk about. This ability to understand how you're coming across emotionally and

how you're making other people feel. I mean, in some ways the book I wrote, Good Boss, Bad Boss, in some ways that's the theme of the whole thing is good leaders understand when they're making people upset, when they're making people happy, when they're being listened to, when they're being shut out. And in the part that I always make is this isn't just because they want to be nice. The most successful leaders also what to use that so

they can manipulate people to their own ends. So so understanding how you're making other people feel to me is one of the hallmarks of a great leader. You all said they also resist the temptation to to believe and reward those who butter them up with flattering bullshit and make it safe for followers to tell them uncomfortable truths. Now that one seems really really important in the workplace because again, like that seems a dovetail with what you're

saying about. You know something's wrong when you go to a workplace and everyone's just kissing up to yap the boss. Right, Well, that's straight out of I don't know that. You know, we interviewed her, but Amy Edmondson from Harvard School. I love her. She's going to be on the podcast later.

She's fabulous. We're old friends. So she's been studying psychological safety forever and that's essentially her findings are when when people, when the leaders aren't hearing and thinking about the uncomfortable truths constantly, that all sorts of bad things happen. So space shuttles explose, patients die, good employees leave, nothing good happens. I believe it. I've seen it. Yeah, Yeah, we've seen it. Yeah. Five. This one got me thinking, fight as if you were right?

Listen as if you were wrong? Now, why the fight is if you were right? Part? Can you explain that to me a little bit? Well? Well, so, so a lot of this comes from well, it comes from research on teams that are most effective in the kind of conflict they have, and teams that are most effective, especially doing non routine work problem solving creativity, they argue over different points of view. You certainly can see this at Pixar.

In fact, I've got some great video of arguments in a team led by Brad Bird where people will argue and fight in an atmosphere mutual respect. So the reason that you want to have when there's constructive conflict, people will argue as if they're right and push their point of view because that's how you sort of develop the argument and maybe convince others. But then when other people push back, what they do is they actually that means they shut up and consider that they might be wrong.

So this is a little bit of wisdom. And by the way, this is speaking of psychologists. This is stolen from probably my favorite, one of my two or three favorite psychologist, car Wike, one of the most imaginative people I've ever met in my life, and that's sort of a Whikian sort of thing. So it's stolen from him. Great, and so that seems to dovetail with your other one about having the confidence, but then the humility. You could

be wrong. Yeah, well I guess I guess these are all pausively correlated in a statistically significant level, right yeah, yeah, Well, well let's see if a real scientist can show us that I've gotten so applied in my old age that i still read the more rigorous stuff, but I'm more into applications. It's helpful for you at all, but I've been Yeah, I'm trying to tell you as some of the overall patterns I'm seeing here. Oh good, Yeah, yeah,

says six. We want we don't want to make this an explicit I guess we already made explicit with the bullshit word, so I'll just go for it. Fear the clusterfuck those debacles and disasters caused by a deadly brew of illusion, in patience, and incompetence. So this is fear the clusterfuck. So I actually have a really funny story.

So this is about this. So in the book that's from Scaling Up Excellent, it's called the clusterfug FuG And I literally had an argument with my editor that he wanted to put on the cover of the book which I wrote with huggey Row, that I was the best selling offer of the author of The No Asshole Rule, And I didn't want the word asshole on the cover of the book because I thought I shouldn't drag poor

Huggy into the asshole thing. But then he wouldn't let us use the word fucking the book and the same like the same, like twenty four hours, so it became clusterfug So what that's from is that Huggy and I have like a little sort of theory in our head, which I think is based on some research, which is that when we look at situations where people make terrible decisions the launch of the Space Shuttle, we use the example of an IT system that was launched at Stanford.

Maybe my favorite one would be the Google Glass. It's almost a perfect example. That's how I use talk the launch of Google Glass. So when leaders, essentially they have the illusion of how great things are going and how smart they are, then they're impatient to get it going, and then their own incompetence turns other people in competent. So if you look at the story of Google Glass,

it's a great example of this. What Sergey Brinn did was they had a prototype of Google Glass in X now Google X and the team showed it too many said oh, that's great, let's throw it in the marketplace. He said no, no, no, it's not ready. He said, yes, yes, it's ready. We're so smart, we can do it, blah blah blah. So then he drags it out of their hands, get the illusion of the impatience. His incompetence turns them incompetent. They can't figure out what to do, and it goes

down in history. Is one of the worst products it ever. And so that's a sort of recipe for human for human disaster. And you know, it's almost always people have too much power and too little humility. And I don't know what kind of intelligence you would call it. Who sort of screw that up? Machiavelian intelligence? Yea, yeah, I don't even know whether Sergey is Macavelli. And he just had too much success and too much money and figured

he could do whatever he wanted. So yeah, maybe there's no kind of intelligence there that they were on the wrong path. There's something else. It's not an intelligence. Well, it's just maybe it's a stupidity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well I didn't want to say that, but that definitely sounds like a cluster FuG regardless of whatever. Okay, seven, this one's interesting. Big teams suck? Is that always true? Well, it's it's mostly you might be able to find some exceptions.

But since since you're a real psychologist, I don't get to talk one very often. You remember the famous Miller's paper seven plus or minus too about that we can only it's one of the most famous papers in psychology, that we can only hold up to nine bits of information in our head. And that sort of seems to

translate to teams. And if you look at old team research by one of my mentors and Amy Edmondson's too, Jay Rich, it happened he would sort of show you once he hit over ten, things sort of fall apart. And we've got all sorts of studies in different situations where, especially when people do tight interdependent work, once you get over six or seven you're sort of in trouble usually,

and and so two things happen. It's it's just a cognitive load problem that that that that essentially, when you've got more people, moods and activities to keep track of, then uh, first of all, what happens is you spend more time coordinating and less time actually doing the work. That's what you'll see in study after study because you spend all this time coordinating him. And then and then the other thing that happens is because you're not in tune with him and you can't keep track of it,

you start having more disagreements and problems. So, so I mean, you're you're like a good cognitive you have a peahd in cognitive psychology or something like my background. That's right, you should know this stuff. You know this stuff a lot better than I do. But it's it's so the argument is sort of a cognitive load problem. Yeah, can you can you give a specific example of how too big of a team led to a product that was a failure. Well, I know it's a product, but it's

one of my it's x a performance example. So we had the America's Cup yacht race. Yeah, I love the ear sailor. By the way, what happened was was that Larry Ellison, whose team ultimately won. Well, at least I used to be a good sailor. Now I can hardly sail at all. But but what happened was Larry Ellison was funding this huge America's Cup effort. And they moved from five person boats to eleven person boats. Okay, so Jimmy spil Hill who was the winning skipper, and one

of my friends, Perry Claybine, got to know him. So what happened is they moved from the five person boat to the eleven person boat. Yeah, and they go out sailing in San Francisco Bay. They capsize the boat and this is a seventy five foot, fifteen million dollars sail boat. By the way, it washes off the Golden Gate Bridge. They break the mast and essentially they had no boat to sail. So we did some group dynamic stuff with them.

So talk to Jimmy Spihill and he says, the problem is is in there they'll have microphones and all can talk. We went from a five person team, so five voices to eleven voices, and we're having problems. So what did they do. They took microphones off of five of the guys on the boat, so there only could be six voices. How do they make that decision? Well, you'd have to if you run the bow, you'd have to say to the guy next to them, tell him blah blah blah.

So there wouldn't be too much to coordinate. So I thought that was a really interesting solution. There's also another story in our book where the US Marines and at the very begining of World War two moved from five person or four person fire teams to twelve person fire teams and had terrible problems in the death rate went way up too. So there's there's other examples too. That's great, you hadn't yet sell boat, but the great great examples. Hey,

so why is why was George Carlin Wright? Oh, George Colin? I also got that George Colin rules. So this is this comes from a book project Hogey Row and I've been working on forever, and we're sort of interested in the notion that very often in organizations, they they suffer from addition sickness, where more and more stuff gets added, more and more rules, more and more things, and nothing

ever gets subtracted. So one of the cause is this is this is the from a George Carlin skit of this addition sid this or sort of tragedy of the commons when it comes to rules and procedures is it's essentially that my stuff or my ship is stuff, Your stuff is shit. So what that means is that everything that I add is good. So everybody has like this incentive to add stuff since my since my ship is stuff and your stuff is shit. And where you really

see this And there's some organizations I'm working with. I'm thinking of Apple right before Steve Jobs took over is a really good example. They had a huge number of products like that had something like that, twenty seven different max for example. And what happened from a power standpoint is that they were kind of organizations where people could in groups, could have enough power to add a new Mac,

but nobody had the power to subtract. So that's where you sort of end up with this tragedy of complexity that actually confuses customers and cost the organization money and causes a bunch of internal conflict in the organization. So what did Jobs do? He came in with a year, He got rid of all the products and he introduced four So that was sort of like Jobs sort of a subtle guy. Yeah, that was a meditation, simplicity vibe that he brought to that table. Yeah, yeah, subtraction minimalism. Yeah,

minimalism saved Apple. Yeah, Yeah, that's great. I love that. Okay, this one is interesting nine because especially because I've been really deeply entrenched in Masso's hierarchy of needs, wrote are you ready for hierarchy is good? Hierarchy is essential, unless isn't always better? Might you just elaborate a bit on that? Well? Well, so, so, first of all, this comes from an essay that I wrote where I made really clear that I hated hierarchy of bureaucracy and was raised by my father to really

hate it. And then I went to Berkeley and protested and like, I just hate the theory. But then I started learning about organizations, and essentially there's a number of papers, including by my colleague Laura Tetons and other psychologists, that essentially shows that you can't find human groups or even animal groups that don't have a pecking order, and then when you tried, when you try to remove the pecking order, they end up fighting like crazy until they get a

pecking order. So and and and people might start talking about things like Zappos and adhocracy, Well that's actually a hierarchy of circles and they had a CEO and pose it on them, Or they might say, what about open

source software? If you look at like something like Mozilla, there's actually benevolent dictators who decide what ultimately goes in the code base, and there's a whole hierarchy of of people and so so the problem is that it seems to be impossible to organize human or animal groups with without some kind of pecking order. What about like communes, Oh, there's always status differences like that, and that that's what

that's that's what Lara's paper is. When you go into any situations, there's not supposed to be a pecking order. There's people get more talking time, people get more goodies. Yeah, what about communism? How did that like? Like that? Like there's always like the people in the party have more

status and goodies than everybody else. Now, I'm not saying that that we shouldn't reduce status differences as much as possible, And we have an enormous amount of evidence that too many layers, too many status differences do all sorts of damage and and so so I'm all for making organizations, if you will, as to de emphasize status differences as much as possible. But but but there almost always has to be somebody who has some decision authority at certain times.

For example, when you need to move fast. And and is my my uh beloved late dissertation advisor used to say, the most reliable way to reduce international warfare in conflict is to have some entity with more power come in and sort of get them to stop so so so so and and and there are other ways to reduce the need to have authority and stuff. But but the fact is, I don't know how to organize a social system of any kind without some status and power differences,

as bad as they turn out to be. Yeah, but it's not always necessarily bad, right. You can have certain arrangements that are of a hierarchy that that are good and positive, right, Yeah, yeah, if if there's participation, if people well what one is so so so so. I there's some other research on the best leaders flex hierarchy. So what what they'll do is when they so they officially when they don't have expertise, they're really good. This is sort of like knowing the people work for you.

They're really good at shutting up and and sort of calling on the person has more expertise and flexing the hierarchy and make that person the highest status person in the room. Until we're done with this decision because you know more than me, and to me, that's what it's sort of. That's what great leaders and people of power do is they know when to surrender power temporarily and go to even or even below power. And then they

also have the power to stop the person. Well, I don't know who who is the the the expert in plastics but knows nothing about manufacturing to uh, to shut up when the manufacturing conversation comes up. I love that. So that that makes so much sense to having a flexible hierarchy. You know where you you're you're willing to to shift and contextually based on what's the best for the best for the larger hole. And then there's there's some evidence by the way that this is how the

most effective startups operate makes sense. Is so yeah, I love it. I love it. If I ever was a leader, that's what I would want to do, that sort of thing. Number ten. Uh, I know you you kind of said you're done with the asshole stuff, but number ten brings you back to your roots in a way. I'm never done, right, that's that. That was like my fourth book. But I'll always be the asshole guy. I accept that. Well, it's it's like it's like, you know the Beatles, like play

your play the song, you know the Strawberry Fields. You know, like, okay, number this track, the asshole track number ten. If you are a winner and an asshole, you're still a loser in my book, because you are harming so many other people and you're lost to build something, make money, or dominate that competition. That one, I gotta admit, Bob, that one sounded very personal to you. That is personal. Well, so yeah, Elon Musk might be an example of this.

By the way, I want to pick somebody who's immediately but but he's an asshole. Uh, there's nobody I know who worked with him who doesn't think he's an asshole. Like I want to find somebody who knows him well who doesn't think he's an ass And and by the way, jobs, there's a lot of people with jobs who thinks he wasn't an asshole, especially later in life. So so right,

although he's younger, who knows. But but to go back, if we go to the weight of the behavioral science literature, let's just go to the weight of the behavioral science literature that if you're somebody who who somehow or another leaves people feeling demean de energized, exploited. You sort of pick your flavor of assholeness that that that it has negative effect effect on their well being, It has negative effect actually on their performance, it has negative effect on

their family life, on their creativity, on their like. It's really really hard if you start just doing a general Google search, and I did this for my uh what I hopefully is my last asshole book seventeen, The Asshole Survival Guide. But actually looking at the behavioral science literature and finding something good about treating people like dirt and

leaving them feeling disrespected, you may succeed. Anyways. Well, I'll say the one good thing about is that if you're in a zero sum game, it may help you get ahead by demeaning and humiliating people and making others feel like dirt. This might be why Michael Jordan. One of the reasons Michael Jordan was successful is he just intimidated everybody so much. So in a zero sum game, it

might help you get ahead. But if you actually care about the fellow human beings around you, in their mental health, their families, their physical health, and even their performance, it's hard to find anything good. You know, assholes love saying assholes finish first. They love saying that. You know, that phrase, the phrase assholes finish first, But it sounds like you're saying, you know, what finish what game? What game are we finishing?

You know, And you're like, I wouldn't even say that you're winning if if you win based on that motivation, Yeah, And it depends. And then and then our friend Adam Grant, we're talking about Adam grand who we love. So Adam is like he's got a pretty strong evidence based case that that that that that essentially people are takers, which would be one flavor of asshole if you will that that that takers will sometimes do better in the short term.

They sometimes are able to support people, to exploit people in sort of short term zero sum games, but if it's a long term game, they tend to do better and to do good for other people along the way. So I can show situations where I'm consistently treating other people like dirt might help you get ahead, but they're pretty ugly situations. And to talk about exceptions that there are it depends what you mean by an asshole, But

there are times when losing your temper. Treating other people like dirt may work in the short term and may

not be a good idea. And one of the examples, and so one of my dear friends and favorite psychologist, Barry Staw, had this paper that was around literally for decades and finally thinks, think to another psychologist, Katie Dessel, got to publish in journal Applied Psychology, and what they showed to oversimplify as much as possible that basketball coaches, high school college basketball coaches who have temper tantruments and get pissed off and yell at the players at halftime,

that if they do it all the time, it doesn't work, and if they never do it, it doesn't work. But the best coaches who occasionally lose their temper and yell at their teams, that that seems to work. Because the explanation seems to be when somebody yells at you who almost never yells at you, you tend to say, oh, it's probably not them, it's probably me, because they don't usually act like that. So you tend to make make

an attribution that's yourself, not the situation. But if it's somebody who's an asshole who yells at you, every time you say, it's just an asshole doing asshole things. Isn't that? How like abusers do it though they are not assholes all the time, feel like abusers and relationships are like every now and then. I don't know. Well, so I do have the in the no asshole role. I have a guide if you want to be a successful asshole,

and and and and and. One of them is not to be all asshole all the time, to be somewhat strategic about it. And then a second a second key one is to have somebody to clean up after you. A toxic handlers. There's sometimes called well our presence got a lot of those, by the way, I know. I was like, I'm not gonna go there, but I'll go. But he's got lots of them. He's got a lot of a lot of people on his staff that that have those functions. Okay, Levin, I will have this one.

I love it so much. I actually just tweeted it. I don't know if you saw a couple of minutes ago, I tweeted this about how Kurt Vonnegut was right. It is often more constructive to tell yourself I have enough, then to keep asking how you can get more and more and more. I don't believe that people who die with the fast money, fancy stuff, power, prestige win the game of life. So tell a little bit about the

about the Kurvaggett story, it's a very short story. So what happened was was very close to to Before he died, Kurt Vonnegat published a poem The New Yorker called Joe Heller, and essentially the punchline of the poem was Joe Heller and Kurt Vonnegatt were at some billionaire's house and Kurt Vonnegatt said something to him like to Joe Heller, something like, you know, he's made more money today than you had

from all the sales of Catch twenty two. And Joe Heller said, but I've got something that he can never have, which is the knowledge that I have enough, and so to me and we're and so when I saw this poem, as I actually wrote Kurt Vonnegut like an old fashioned letter and asked for permission. He did, Yes, I can send you the postcard and asked for permission poem in

my book. He responded with a personal postcard somewhere on my blog, a personal postcard in which he said, I had basically unlimited rights to use the poem for whatever I want. So that was that was one. I'll send you a copy of it later. That was one of

my great most exciting moments. So so anyhow, so it comes from this, this this poem, and it appeared that people who never have enough, like they never have enough power, they never have have enough sex, like they just all And in fact, that's what the title of kind of like the new book by Donald Trump's nieces about, isn't it. I mean it's it's it's sort of that's that's sort

of the what's the title of that book? Too much and never enough or something too much and never enough just that striving, I mean I never enough status, I never enough beautiful women, I mean all that, I never have enough money. I just want to crush you more and more. Yeah, I really loved that, uh that story, that Kravan Gonna Get story. It was the first time I came across it, and it was very exciting because I've been just thinking so much about that lately, about

how that's just like the secret of contentment. It's there's just no way around it. And it also is on the other side of it of never having enough. It's it's one of the things that fuels these just crazy status and power differences, just that sort of lust for more,

like how much do you need? Yeah, it's like with wine, l like like like I kind of got obsessed with wine and started drinking like these hundred dollars wines, and the thing I sort of figured out, so there's not that big a difference between like a good twenty dollars wine and a good two undred dollars wine. And now it's like, now my contest as are fine as many wines under twenty dollars are as good as possible. And I,

honestly I can't tell the difference. And I had I drank a lot of really expensive wines to figure that out. I've never tried it. I've never tried like a billion dollar wine before. Now maybe two drede not a lot of them that much money. I may have done a two hundred bottle glass. I'm trying to remember. But anyway, you know, these wine experts will will swear there's such subtle differences. You know, the wine tasters have this special tongue. Yeah,

the special time. Yes, Okay, twelve, we're back to your your greatest hits. If you were plagued by an asshole or a pack of them, ovey a pack of them, make a clean getaway if you can. If you can't develop a strategy, this is just fun out of a line weapons. If you can't develop a strategy for protecting yourself and fell victims from the onslaught, for preserving your dagny and spirit, and for fighting back, how can you get away sometimes when they're so persuasive. Well, I mean,

so there's a lot to unpack here. In some ways this is I think that was a case of me trying to have an overly long summary of all the ideas in a book, which is The Asshole Survival Guide. But essentially there's a lot of situations where people wait too long. And this is like abusive relationships you were talking about too and they just keep taking it and taking it. And I mean, all the evidence is is

that once you leave, you're much better off. And this notion that people quit bosses not organizations is very well documented and it is true. And then I do talk about the notion that there are times when you can't get away, and there are different things you can do to reduce the amount of stress you have. One is you can distance yourself sort of just like the kryptonite. Second one is probably more cognitive behavioral therapy type stuff,

laughing at it, minimizing the threat, intellectualizing. And then I guess sort of last, but not least, is that there are times when you can fight back. And Gretchen Carlson versus Roger Ales might be the perfect example. So you do two things. You document and you get allies. If you recall, your listeners will recall. Gretchen Carlson was sexually harassed by Roger Ales. She brought it in her iPhone and recorded him hitting on her repeatedly, for example, and

making bad comments. But dealing with him it's you know, I wrote a book about it. But when I've got when I've got to asso on my life, it's not like it's easy to figure out how to survive this. It's like any other abusive relationship. It's not easy. Pop. I have a maybe a little bit of a tangential question,

but how do you know you're not the asshole? And not you by the way, not Bob Sutten, but I'm saying in general because I've noticed in my experience that most most people I think their assholes, they actually think that the other person's the asshole. Yeah, they don't think by the asshole. So that's I don't think it's a tangential a tangential question, and the evidence actually supports it.

If you look at some reasonable national surveys of a book workplace bullying, and it's something like about fifty percent of Americans report that they have either observed or been victim of ongoing abuse in something like a half a percent of Americans say they've been the person doing it. So those numbers, those numbers don't don't add up. And as you would know, there's all sorts of self serving

attributions where people will do it. And I mean, and so I end the first chapter of the Asshole Survival Guide by sort of saying, because it's a small way to reduce the biases, to be slow to label other people as asshole, and to be fast to label yourself. And then I talk about various elements. Probably the best thing you can have in your life, this gets to psychological safety, is to have somebody in your life who will tell you the truth when you've been a jerk.

And the example that I use towards the end of The Asshole Survival Guide is Clementine Churchill, who was Winston's wife. That was apparently apparently he could be pretty nasty, and that was one of her jobs was to tell him when he's he'd been an asshole and sort of been. Nineteen forty or so, when the blitz was hitting London and the obvious was under a lot of stress, she wrote him a famous letter where she basically told him, you're being a jerk. They're afraid of you, and you're

not getting the best out of them. You've got to stop being so nasty Winston. She'd put them more elegantly than that, but the idea of having someone in your life.

And by the way, if you go back to the Steve Jobs story, people who know him well, like Ed Catmill, who's in a group that we're part of who has had a Pixar for twenty five years, they will tell you that one of the reasons that Jobs actually became better the last decade of his life was that he had a guy named Bill Campbell, who's known as the coach in Silicon Valley, the late Bill Campbell, who would pull Steve aside and tell him when he'd blown it.

Who's Steve respected. Well, this seems to early to your coach example with you know the person who every now and then yells at you you listen, yep, yeah, yep, because you know they love you most of the time at least. Yes. Yeah. Well, well Bill Kimball would yell. He'd kind of tease you and swear at you and tell you love you and give you a big higu as that kind of guy. He was an institution in Silicon Valley. He coached almost all of the major teams.

And by the way, he didn't ask for money. I mean he was CEO of into it and was independently wealthy and was on the board. He just did it because he kind of loved doing it. That's cool. I'm trying to think of what Carl Rodgers would say about this, because he was all into like unconditional positive guard Maybe you know, you can still have positive regard for someone, but tell them that they've they've been n asshole. Yeah, well that's I love you and I love you no

matter what. But it would be better for you and those around you if you did blank. Isn't that love? Yes, I mean that's love. Yeah, that is love. That's great, It's really great. Number thirteen, Am I a successor or a failure? Is that a success or a failure is not success or a failure? Gotcha? I had successor without any space between success and the word or am I a success or failure? Is not a very useful question.

It is better to ask what am I learning? So this is this is actually from Carl Wyke and also the originally the folks who did the origin, the original Hawthorne studies, famous psychological studies. The reason it's not a very useful question sort of following you know one of my heroes, Carl Wyke, is that is that essentially that sort of focusing on the end state, and most things in life are part success and part failure. And if you think you're, oh, I'm a loser, I'm a loser.

That tends to demotivate you. If you think I'm a winner, you think that I'm really smart, And neither one of those are very conducive to learning. And the best question, the best question is what what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? And to keep asking yourself that as you go, as you go through life, because focusing on whether I'm a loser or winner. Is it's not very useful emotionally. One leads to arrogance, the other one.

The other one leads to kind of depression. And and and focusing on what I am learning is more useful. And and I'd actually add a footnote to that that that in Silicon Valley, and we even do this with companies, will celebrate failures. I actually don't like failure. I think that it sucks. I think that I get depressed when I get when I fail. I feel bad even when

my enemies fail, because it hurts. But but nonetheless, we all know that it's more useful to focus on what we're learning for ourselves and to others, and to move forward. And this is another sort of car White thing. It's just really true. Yeah, it's it's also it feels very Carol Delkish. Oh yes, yeah, yes, it's a growth mindset. Four. Team life is always going to be a bit messy,

especially if you're doing something interesting and new. Try to create as much simplicity and clarity as you can, but embrace and enjoy inevitable confusion and messiness too. During COVID, how does this apply? Ooh well, COVID is an extreme example of this, isn't it Yeah? So I mean I said this long before COVID, and I guess COVID is

an extreme case. But every situation, I know, when you sort of look back or even you're there, when people are doing great stuff like Google sort of growing like crazy, I have the most successful sports teams, whatever, if you actually talk to people who are there who tell you the truth instead of the Sanitai story picks the growth of Pixar, for example, which is wildly successful, and you ma company, it's almost every day it almost always feels

messy and difficult. And where I learned this was from my friend David Kelly, who grew very successful company IDEO started the Stanford d School that I'm part of. When you go to David and you complain and say things are all screwed up, he essentially says, if you're doing something important and new, you're going to be confused much of the time, and you kind of got to deal with it and move forward and do the best you can. But it's never going to be beautiful and linear and clean.

And to me, that's what leadership and being part of some part of life is about. I guess to go to go to COVID. None of the solutions are going to be easy or clean. There's going to be a lot of failure. And I actually think that I'm seeing some intelligence around this that the number of organizations throughout the world are you that are doing different vaccine and treatment programs and assuming most are going to fail, and that's just a mess that's necessary to get through this process.

And so you can't be upset when there's there's setbacks. Now, I think where I get upset is when there's a lack of wisdom to go back to some of the early ones where people have strong opinions, strongly hell or that they can't have constructive conflict. I think that's where we get in trouble. Yeah, that's a great distinction. That's a great distinction in general, that that whole point fourteen feels very Zen Buddhist to me or stoic the stoic. Wow, I guess it, I guess it is. I guess I

guess that it is. So what's that book of Zen and the Art of Archery? I bet you know that in the Art of the Motorcycle man? Oh yeah, but the Zen and the Art Archery? I forgot to run the point. The point was you don't focus on the end. You just focus on the process of how you string the bow, yes, how you put the arrow on, how you pick the arrow, how you draw back. You don't

think about hitting the target. You sort of focus on the on, the on, the on, the process, and and was ar tree is a pretty clean sort of operation compared to the mess of COVID, where everything's just all screwed up all the time, and in lesser ways just doing a startup word like, there's always major problems. Indeed, number fifteen this is our last one. So this is our triumphant. Oh, I can't believe we made it. I've never gone I've never done all fifteen ever, by the way,

I usually do ten in my class. Well, this is this is the monumental podcast chat. I really like fifteen because well it has to do with racing sailboats, so I like it. Jimmy Maloney was right, work is an overrated activity. And this kind of circles back to how we started, you know, this conversation. So so the reason I have number fifteen just philosophically, and I did mention this at the outset, is that I were going to

setting Stanford University. It is so work focused, so achievement focused, so capitalist focus that that that I and my students and they're not all like this, but it's so much in the air that it's sort of a problem and we're and even you know, and even when people want to go into nonprofits and education, they've worked as a solution to everything. So anyways, so I used to raise sailboats.

And this was kind of in the nineties, especially with my lifelong friend Jimmy Maloney, and we raised this two person boat and we had to call a five or five and and every weekend and he had a kind of crummy dob essentially doing nasty finance in real estate, and every weekend he'd say work socks works over rated, Work socks works overrated. And of course people say stuff like that all the time. But then one day, Jimmy

and his wife Loretta, they sell their house. They sold their house for about a million dollars, which is it's a fair amount of money, but not that much money. They bought a sailboat. They pulled their three kids out of school, who are probably seven, nine, and twelve then something like that, and they cruise the Pacific Ocean for about two and a half years, and then they ended up in New Zealand, which seems even smarter than it

did at the time. And they so they quit their jobs and they do a little work, like Loretta, who is a school teacher, would do a little substitute teaching. Jimmy would work one or two days in the tablets, but they mostly just focus on raising their kids and sailing and the upshot which actually even since I wrote that has changed in different ways. Was so they raised their three kids. The oldest one, Jimmy has becomes a

professional sailor. The other two become two of the best sailors in New Zealand, and New Zealand's has the best sailors in the world. And to give you evidence, there are there are twelve members. Last time I looked of the New Zealand Olympic team for whatever the next Olympics is. One is one is his his his daughter Alex, who already has won a silver medal, and the other one is his son Andy in the single headed boat, who's already won the America's Cup as a crew member. So

those are the kids that he raised. The in some ways, it bothers me a little bit. There's so much achievement that's come out of this, so maybe a little bit too much achievement. But it used to just be that they just blew it off. In the last couple of times I've talked to Jimmy and the Redham, they really are much happier than most people I know. I love that. I love kind of ending on that, not the peak,

but the plateau. Maslow talked about the plateau experience, which is, you know, finding the miraculous in the every day, you know, as opposed to everything having to be this big peak, you know, like I reached the top of the mountain all the time. Yeah, so in the miraculous and the other day. Just something about Jimmy since I sailed with him in a long time, Yeah, he loved I guess

you would call it a flow experience too. One of the problems we had competitively was, and he's obviously a good sailor when championships and he raised all these champions is when the boat felt really great and we're going straight, even was the wrong direction in a race, he just get into the grooves so much. He just that was his favorite part of sailing, which was pretty good when he got ocean into that boat, just going for days in one direction and it felt really great. So that's

just kind of how Jimmy always thought to though. I just wanted to be in that. What would you call that? We just feel so good and so simple. I think flow. I think flow is inadequate phrase for that, or even me I Maslow's notion of well, it could be a peak experience as well. Yeah, that's beautiful, Bob. Thank you so much for cheting with me today about something that's not entirely about assholes, and you know, a broader framework,

a broader framework for your life and offering us our wisdom. Well, thank you, Scott. It's a delight to talk to you. It's a delight to talk to a fellow psychologist. And this is the first interview I've ever given, and I do a lot of interviews actually where somebody asked me about about this set of things I believe. So it was really fun, and that was you didn't really get canned answers for me because I actually had to think about this stuff you asked. So thank you, thank you,

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