Bob Sutton on building a workplace with healthy friction and no assholes

CAMP005 - Bob Sutton

Bob Sutton: We keep, having bigger and bigger power, money, status differences between the top and the bottom. And I'm talking about within organizations. You can just look at the research about the difference between the, the salary of the CEO and the average member of an organization. But all the evidence is that the bigger distance there is between you, if you're the top dog and everybody else, well, it does bad things to your mind. They're afraid to approach you. People have trouble cooperating. That's one of the most reliable ways to turn people into jerks, to be insensitive, to be nasty, is to give them power and money.

The question that I want to know is if somebody is a well known demeaning jerk and is a star, do they get ahead or is it somebody who got ahead by being a really nice person, but then when they got in a position of power, they turned into a jerk because the power went to their head?

What happens in great cultures, is that they don't let things fester, and by they, I mean we together, and this idea of accountability, the feeling that I own the place and the place owns me. And that's when I've been in a great high performance type team. It's where you pull people aside and you have the conversations and you nip problems in the bud.

Just as organizations get larger, older, more complex, you have more red tape, you have more friction and you do need more hierarchy, you do need more rules and so forth. As you get larger and more complex. so people started complaining about how difficult it was to get, work done at places like Google. There was a whole bunch of things that large complex organizations could do to make things better so that there wasn't destructive friction that drove people crazy

Damon Klotz: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Culture First podcast. I am your host, Damon Klotz. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Bob Sutton. Bob is an organizational psychologist, a Stanford professor of management, and a New York Times best selling author.He has written eight books, including his most recent one co authored with Huggy Rao, The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. He is an expert on leadership, Organizational change and workplace dynamics. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about friction and assholes and the impact that they have on the world of work. So let's head on over to my conversation with Bob. So today on the Culture First podcast, I'm joined by Bob Sutton. Bob, thanks so much for joining me.

Bob Sutton: Ah, it's great to be here, Damon. Damon, I'm working on it every second. It's great to meet you.

Damon Klotz: Likewise. So yeah, I've been really excited to have this conversation. you've been a requested guest. I've had many friends tell me that, how have I not had a conversation with you? So let me connect the dots about why I think our worlds are so interesting. So, Culture Amp, who produces this show, Culture Amp's mission is to create a better world of work. And I wanted to start with this quote about your work that I think connects it to the world of Culture Amps. And it comes from Adam Grant, who said the following when referencing the work of yourself and your co author, Huggy Rao, he said, no one knows more about making work better than this pair of experts. They produced a remarkably insightful, engrossing, evidence based and actionable read. If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be less miserable, more productive place. So I think Culture Amp trying to make the world of work better and that review, which I saw your face as I was saying it out loud. It's always hard to listen to, isn't it?

Bob Sutton: Yes, it is. And I've known Adam so long, I've known him before he was famous and when he was a 24 year old hotshot. It's very kind of him to say that. I admire Adam a great deal. But yes, I would say, you know, sort of the usual embarrassment aside, and it is kind of hard to hear, that if I go back to the beginning of my career, and it's interesting you mention Adam, because we went to the same PhD program and have a similar intellectual lineage, and our intellectual lineage to me goes back to a guy named Robert Elkhann, who was my dissertation advisor. Bob died about two or three years ago at the age of 100. And Bob, devoted his career. He didn't get his PhD till he was forties. And so for those out there who, you know, want to start things a little later in life, he's a role model. But Bob always was looking for, how do we build organizations that are high performing in terms of making money, being innovative, the usual capitalist stuff, and at the same time, treat the human beings in them as human beings. In ways that are civilized with dignity that protect their mental and physical health. And in Bob's book, if you didn't accomplish both of those things, you failed as a leader, as an organization. and I do think that there's many differences between, for example, what Adam and I do and what we focus on. I think I'm more organizational than he is. That hallmark, that if you are not, treating human beings well, And you're, performing, then you're still a loser is I think something that just really just runs through my soul. And I believe in capitalism. I'm not like a socialist. I believe in making money. I believe in efficiency, but if you treat people like dirt along the way, there's all sorts of bad things happen, and plus you're not a good human being, to be honest.

Damon Klotz: And I think that's why I was really excited to have this conversation because we've like, you know, we're up to like 80 plus episodes of this show. It's been running for a long time. We've done a lot of different sort of, you know, lots of authors and company leaders and whatnot, but we're going to be talking about Two very pointed words that I think are at the heart of our experience at work, but don't always get spoken about, which is arseholes and friction.

Bob Sutton: Well, so here we are, so I'm glad we can say the word assholes and sometimes it's such, it's such a, what do you want to start with? I'll go wherever you want.

Damon Klotz: We've got the attention of the listener. They're like, okay, this is not a whole episode about data or research. This is not a whole episode about what's happening in HR. We're talking about their day to day realities of what happens at work. But before we dive into solving the arsehole and friction problem, we do have a couple of traditions that we do on culture first here.

Bob Sutton: Oh, gotta go for it.

Damon Klotz: The first one is people are going to be like, okay, this guy sounds interesting, or maybe they've seen you on LinkedIn, or they've seen some of your books, but let's say that there's a curious 10 year old with a funny Australian accent who comes up to you and says, excuse me, Bob, what do you do for work? How do you answer?

Bob Sutton: Almost always a happy worker is a productive worker. I'm interested in helping people, have better work, be happier at work. I might say when you're, I want to create work where, when your mom or dad comes home from a day at work that they feel great about what happened rather than are grouchy.

Those are some of the things I might say to a 10 year old. I, I actually talked to a 10 year old this weekend, in Berkeley. So I'm, I'm prepared. He said, what do you do? And his dad was there. And I said, so doesn't your dad comes home from work some days happy and some days grouchy, doesn't he? And he said, yeah. And he said, I want your dad to come home from work. I'm happy more often.

Damon Klotz: Was that kid wearing a Culture First podcast t-shirt?

Bob Sutton: No, he was not. He was actually wearing a Cal t-shirt, University of California, Berkeley, my alma mater. So I thought he was all right.

Damon Klotz: There you go. Well, I've, I've, I've somehow inspired 10 year olds around the world to go ask strangers what they do for work. So one of my secret missions on this podcast is working. The other tradition that I have is, so Esther Perel is an advisor to Culturamp. She's a relationship therapist. She's got her card game. Where should we begin? I picked out a couple of random questions. I'm going to ask this one of you, because I feel like it's timely based on the episode. So the question is, Something I would like to change about the way that I deal with conflict.

Bob Sutton: Oh, I, it's a conflict so hard. And I spent years trying to teach Stanford students to be better at having constructive agreements. And I wish I had made more progress. But for me, I can do passive aggressive, which is subtle digs, and I can do really nasty. There's this middle ground, which I can tell you empirically is the hallmark of great arguments, where you can argue with people in a way where neither one of you gets your feelings hurt. But you argue about ideas. That's really hard for me. Sometimes I feel like I can do it with everybody in my life, my PhD students in the past, my boss, my wife, my children, pick who you want. That there's that beautiful zone where you have an argument where it feels like loving conflict. That's, I want to be better at that.

Damon Klotz: I think my take on that is, um, I think one thing I struggle with is ambivalence.

Bob Sutton: Oh.

Damon Klotz: Just like when you're trying to, like when you know that maybe you should be having a conversation and there's just this ambivalence and maybe it's just, people are tired, they're burnt out, but they're like, they don't have the energy even to have healthy conflict anymore.

Bob Sutton: Yeah. And, and, and it really is an important skill in, in not just for me or for the workplace, but I mean, just for the entire world right now, just to keep us alive as a species, we need to get better at that. Gosh.

Damon Klotz: All right. So I thought we'll start with the macro, because you meet with many different leaders and companies. So I thought rather than dive straight into some of the more tactical process things that you've written about, what comes to mind when I ask you what's going on at work right now?

Bob Sutton: That's an interesting question. There's lots of things going on at work. the two things that I see that are going on simultaneously, especially United States is that we keep saying it's bad, but at the same time, and, this is not necessarily DI, but, but we keep having bigger and bigger power, money, status differences between the top and the bottom. And I'm talking about within organizations while at the same time talking about how important it is to de-emphasize them and, legitimate them, you can, you can just look at the research about the difference between the salary of the CEO and the average member of an organization. and this is a trend that has gone on for a very long time. It's especially pronounced in the United States. It's actually less bad in Europe and in other countries, but this idea about accentuating status, power, financial differences, and all the, it's great to be on top, but all the evidence is that the bigger distance there is between you, if you're the top dog and everybody else, well, it does bad things to your mind. They're afraid to approach you. People have trouble cooperating. So that's happening. And then the other thing, and this is something I'm sure you talk about this every day with people around you, is that I think that people in, in, organizations are really, really confused about what's going to happen with AI. And I'm not saying that, they're confused about like people know how to use, uh, chat, GPT or, uh, pick whatever your favorite large language model is, Many people know how to use them, but the question of what that is going to do to skills, to the workplace and everything, I think that people are genuinely confused and the one thing that I learned, working with futurists, there's probably the The, the most respected futurist is a guy named Phil Tetlock at university, at Wharton Business School. Is that human beings are terrible at predicting the future. And the more confident they are, the more likely they are to be wrong. That's the only thing he's sure of. and so, but I, I, I think that people are simultaneously terrified and fascinated with all the different AI tools. So those are the two things I see going on at once. the workplace. And those aren't areas I have more expertise in the first and the second. I taught in an engineering school for 40 years. So I think that some of my colleagues know a lot more about AI than I do. but I just see just across the board at every level. Especially, I think, the more senior the executives are, the more confused they are and the less they know. And there's also quite good evidence that the people at the top of the hierarchy in large corporations are the most ignorant people about AI in large companies. So that's another problem. They don't use it and can't figure out what the heck it's for.

Damon Klotz: I think there's a huge opportunity for companies to actually provide some guidance here. It sort of reminds me, like, when I entered the workplace, I sort of entered at that time where it was the divide between company issued BlackBerrys and people wanting to use iPhones. And if you remember that time, it's like, like, I remember the first BlackBerry I got was like, I felt like I'd made it as like a business person because my, like, my dad had a BlackBerry. I was like, oh man, I'm important. But then, everyone was like, actually, like the technology that I use at work is outdated, and I want to use new technology, but the company's not telling me whether I'm allowed to, and I feel like that's kind of where we're at with AI. It's like people, if you're curious, you can go learn, and you can go use it yourself, and you can use AI is like your own little journal reflective thing where you put in your thoughts and your questions and it comes back and it makes you more curious and interesting. But that's a personal use. Companies, you know, like how are we going to be using it? What is it going to mean for our skills? you know, repertoire moving forward, how do we hire for, for the, these sorts of things. So I still think there's a little bit of ambivalence around the company dictating some terms around what great AI usage looks like.

Bob Sutton: Yeah, so I think that's true with large language models, but I was to have some of my, engineering colleagues sitting next to me, they would say stuff, well, name one, like Melissa Valentine, my wonderful, colleague, who is really a very good engineer for somebody who has never had engineering,doesn't have an engineering degree, she studies, algorithms at work and, and, and, And she did all the, all this stuff on, algorithms as your boss. So if you work for Uber, you work for an algorithm, or if you work for, if you're an Amazon delivery person, at least in the United States, the algorithm is the boss. And in fact, at Amazon, the algorithm can fire you. And when you get fired by the algorithm, even unjustly, it's actually really hard to get reinstated, to get past the algorithm. So algorithmic management has been around for a long, well, for a while now. So, large language models are a whole different thing to your point, but algorithms have been around the workplace for a long time.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, and I'm sure that that'll be a debate moving forward. Who gives better feedback or who runs better exit surveys, the algorithm or humans,

Bob Sutton: Oh.

Damon Klotz: You know?

Bob Sutton: That's correct.

Damon Klotz: So we, we tease this episode with, you know, like we think about the year sort of 2025 and where we're sort of at with, you know, there's this been sea of kind of change and employees have really had to flex to like organizations and vice versa. Organizations flex their working styles in many ways to help employees over the last few years. I think one thing that maybe, like, from my personal perspective, the last few years has really made me go a bit more introspective about, you know, what do I work on? How do I spend my time? And I know other people are sort of like, you know, is this the work that I should be doing? And who do I work with? And this whole idea that doesn't matter how good the perks and benefits are, you know, if you're working at somewhere where you're working with people who make you feel terrible, where you lose sleep at night, then it doesn't matter how good your job is and whatnot, because it just starts to impact you. And. It leads to tension, which is why I wanted to tie your work with arseholes and tension together, which, when doing research for this, I had to type in, you know, Bob Sutton arsehole a lot into Google and YouTube to find clips on this, which I apologize if that messes up your SEO for a while.

Bob Sutton: No, no, I don't think you're alone. I, I have been introduced, including for years at McKinsey events as this is Bob Sutton, he's done research and all this stuff, blah, blah, blah. But, he will always be known as the asshole guy, no matter what else he does. So I, I accept my little position in the world. So let's talk about it.

Damon Klotz: So maybe we'll start with the friction piece and then we'll move on to friction and its relationship to arseholes. So you, you launched, the friction project with your colleague, Huggy, And your latest book encapsulates a lot of the work and research that you've sort of been doing, but I'd like to maybe go back to maybe the inception moment around what was the moment that led to you actually wanting to really look at this as a, as a project.

Bob Sutton: So that's a good question. So I'm not sure it's a moment. I think it was a dawning realization. But so in 2014, Huggy and I wrote a book called Scaling Up Excellence. And there was all these companies, you know, you said that you've lived here in the States, in the Silicon Valley, and there were all these companies that were scaling baby scale.

They wanted to scale. So, uhI was around Facebook so long that I, the last time I was, on the payroll at Facebook as a consultant, the entire company fit in one room, in a small room, in a hotel, like 250 people. And so they wanted to scale baby scale. Google, I knew in the early days, Salesforce. And they, and they scaled like crazy and maybe they followed some of the advice or, in our book on scaling up excellence, but then they got this giant complicated thing. Well, Airbnb would be another example. They got this giant complicated thing where, just as organizations get larger, older, more complex, you have more red tape, you have more friction and you do need more hierarchy, you do need more rules and so forth. As you get larger and more complex. So people started complaining about how difficult it was to get work done at places like Google. Google is actually one of my nominees for years. They're making a lot of money still, but man, is it hard to get things done there? And on a more personal level at my own university, Stanford, which I, I, I hate to give away my age, but I started working here when I was in 1983. So I've been here a long time. And all these things got, despite, or maybe because of all the software we've bought over the years, things got harder and harder and harder to get done at Stanford, both because of the systems and just because we've hired so many administrators, frankly. so, just the frustration of how hard it was to get things done and, to be vivid, just the book starts out with an email from a senior Stanford leader that was sent to all 2000 Stanford faculty members. It was 1266 words long. It had a 7500 word attachment and invited all of us to spend Saturday on Zoom. Brainstorming, all 2000 of us, one brainstorm, brainstorming about our new sustainability school. And I love our new sustainability school, but, uh, really, and, and I have since put it in chat GPT and I said, chat GPT, make this shorter. And I, I got it down to 250 words, like in a second and it lost nothing. and if you just sort of do the math, this idea that, uh, that organizations impose unnecessary burdens on us. So that's, that was sort of the, the point of inception that but I really do think that the key point of inception, if I was to pick one, was what was happening, to a friend of mine who had been at Google from the beginning and, and how she just, quite senior person, I will not name her, quite senior, who just kept complaining about it, kept getting harder and harder and harder and my God, what have we done to ourselves? So, so that's just sort of pain and frustration. We can talk about the good news, but that's kind of the bad news.

Damon Klotz: Well, look, I think it's a, it's one of those, age old stories where it's like when companies get something right, it means that they get the benefit or even the opportunity to, to grow. But with that growth then slows down some of the things that made it great in the first place. And what we don't want is a world where companies have 300 employees because it's the only way work can get done. But we need large corporations, but also there needs to be some, I guess, healthy tension points in these large organizations. Because, you know, my journey at CultureRamp was from a, everyone sitting around one desk at all hands with 13 employees bootstrapped to a thousand person software company. And I'm like, I saw the reinvention over my 10 years there about how Yeah, like some things used to be easy and then they got hard and things that used to be hard got easy. But I was in constant conversation with around why is this now hard and why is this now easy and what does that actually mean?

Bob Sutton: Yeah. So, sort of zeroing in on that,our book has all sorts of data and evidence about the ways that organizations add burden on people and the stress of red tape and how it can make people sick. And, and there's a whole bunch of evidence about that. But, you know, which I don't think that, uh, you know, the people in your audience, I'd even know to go through. We all know what it feels like, but the thing that really struck me was that there was a whole bunch of things that large complex organizations could do to make things better so that there wasn't destructive friction that drove people crazy just one example, what Satya Nadella has done at, at Microsoft. to make things better in that organization is just amazing. and, you know, we, we, we know the, their finance, their numbers have gone way up in terms of just the value of that company has gone up exponentially. but one of the most important things that he has done to reduce destructive, internal friction and friction in terms of getting it hard for people to cooperate and hand, handoffs is that essentially change the definition of a superstar.

Because in the old era with Steve Ballmer, the definition of a superstar was somebody who essentially, stomped on others on the way to the top and actually set up your colleagues for failure. And, and this is a case, it's not like Satya is warm and fuzzy or anything like that. But they've changed their entire system about what is a superstar? Well, a superstar is now somebody who helps people get ahead rather than fail. And they've fired people. who were destructive and would lead to backstabbing. They've changed how they've hired people. I mean, across the whole set of all the cultural touch points, the performance evaluation system, all that sort of stuff. What Satya talks about, he talks about, you're, you're the most important person is no longer to the smartest person in the room. It's the person who sort of learns the most and ask the most questions. And there's a lot of behavioral science behind that, but to me that, that's a case of there, there can be good change, in large complex systems. And there even can be good change in government. We can talk about that. But that's one of the things that, uh, Huggy and I have really been focusing on a lot lately is that it isn't all bad news in government. There's a whole bunch of things that are done to make government better.

Damon Klotz: I think that's why when I saw your latest work, it made sense when I saw sort of the different topics you touched on for a while, but really kind of honing in on friction being one of the things that probably frustrates employees the most about the employee experience. You know, like you shouldn't be at the burden of like the success of a company where it just gets harder forever. Like you have to know what a good friction and bad friction looks like. And people probably have like a negative connotation of friction. You're like, Oh man, like why would I want friction inside of this company? So can, for anyone who's listening to this going, why are these two people talking about increasing friction? Can you tell the difference between good and bad friction?

Bob Sutton: There's so well, well, to me, bad friction is, when your desire to do something that you think is good and is good for your company and is good for your clients. It's all something that you all think should be easy. Let's just say like hiring someone, let's just say like onboarding someone that that's a frustrating, confusing, bewildering, anger inducing you. Experience that just everybody cusses like crazy. So you F bombs everywhere. You went, that's, you know, like, one of the managers that, uh, we had in one of our classes, executive education class said, you know, they want me to show initiative, but I feel like I'm swimming in a sea of shit, that sort of feeling that that's the bad stuff, the good stuff. And this is one of those things that started emerging as, as our studies started progressing is, first of all, there's some things that should be impossible to do something unlawful, unethical, it should be impossible. So that's one. So there's, there's a famous, Stanford dropout named Elizabeth Holmes, who is currently in, in jail or prison, I guess.

Damon Klotz: I like how you're still claiming her as like a famous stem. Like

Bob Sutton: Oh, oh, I, Well, she only was here a year, but apparently, she learned some of the wrong lessons. I can give you my list of Stanford dropouts. It's like amazing. Reese Witherspoon, John Steinbeck, John McEnroe, Tiger Woods. We have quite a list. Anyways. so some of them are more distinguished, but anyhow, she lied about her device and did not get government approval. That should be, it should be impossible and you should get in trouble for that. Then. The other, and we have a very long list of this, there's a whole bunch of things where, that you should be forced to slow down on and one of the classic things is, and this is the Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, Danny Kahneman had this argument and lots of evidence to support it, is when you're in a cognitive minefield, when you're confused, when things are screwed up, when you don't know what to do, when you're Then you should just stop. It's sort of like the, the, the analogy that he would sometimes use when he gave talks is you don't want your doctor to start operating on you before he or she figures out what the problem is. Like that, like that's, you know, it's like move fast and break things sometimes feels like they're doing the operation before they know the cause of the disease.or if you need an operation, even at all. So this idea, sometimes the best thing is don't just do something, stand there and figure out what's going on. And, you know, and two more, we have a very long list. Two more is the research on creativity. Maybe chat GPT will save us, but the research on creativity is up to this point in human existence. Our ability to make creativity more efficient is, it's pretty lousy. Creativity, it's a fundamentally inefficient process. it's a high failure rate, there's confusion, there's arguing, and that's the nature of creativity, and people who study creative genius, they will say that the hallmark of the most creative people in organizations is they don't have a higher hit rate, they just try more stuff. So, there's that, and then the third thing I would say is, you know, my old line that you, from the Supremes, you can't hurry love. When it comes to deep, long term trusting relationships, it's the analogy, it doesn't happen on the first date. It takes a long time to develop, that's true in our dating and personal relationships. It's also true if we look at the most effective teams. In duos and organizations, they have what we call prior joint experience. it's no accident, just to give you a little, a little example, that so many great companies that have come out of my university, Stanford, in addition to our, our various criminals, we've already talked about, but so many great companies started where people work together on student projects together and figured out That they, and they develop their relationships. So Hewlett and Packard, Larry and Sergey, from Google. And one of my favorite ones in the only Stanford startup I've ever invested in. There's two students who have started a company called SQL, Amanda Calabrese and Greta Meyer. SQL has reinvented the modern tampon. And the two of them worked together first doing sort of the science of the product for about two years, and then they worked on getting funded, blah, blah, blah. Worked together for four or five years as Stanford undergrads before they graduated, and then they got five million dollars for their company. So that, so this idea that, developing really great long term relationships, it's, and all of us who've been in great long term relationships, it's not an efficient process, developing like a caring relationship where you understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and how to help each other succeed. So, I mean, those are just a few examples, but there are certain times when it's just sort of rushing ahead is not the best idea. You got to kind of slow down and be patient and go through the mess of life.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, look, there's so much to double click on there, especially with, um, you know, when you look at the tenure rates inside of companies and like some of the value that more tenured employees can bring is that they have a lot of connective tissue, both on organizational knowledge, but also people and the amount of trust that can be brought in when you bring someone in on a project and like, well, that person's worked with three people on this, they can help make some connective tissue for people who've never worked with this person. And we can get a higher sense of trust. Early on, because like business is a high stakes game for the most part. But what you were sort of saying is that a lot of these people had, connect, connective tissue in a lower stakes game, like a university assignment or something where they were, could form some of these connections. So I think it's such a great way to think about not just who is the right tactical person to get something done, but who is the right how work gets done person that might make the collective better.

Bob Sutton: Yes, yes, that's lovely.

Damon Klotz: One of the, I guess, one of the roles that, you know, I often think like we talk a lot about what happens at work, we don't always talk about how, and I think I'm a lot about sometimes the highest paid person in the room says something quickly than an entire decision gets made that then changes like that, like an entire company now meets every Tuesday for like nine years because someone mentioned it once. And you're like, we need people to like, You know, really think about like, when was this decision made? Does it still serve us? Did it get us to a point who has the power and control to change it? And you talk about leaders being friction fixes. Why is this a skillset that leaders need to be thinking about this year?

Bob Sutton: So to us, well, I mean, friction is just a lens, a lens, but to us, we start with friction fixers from our perspective. It kind of starts with this belief, and this is what our first chapter is called in the friction project, is that to us, great. Friction fixers are leaders in general. And in fact, it can be people in all parts of the organization, not just senior leaders. They see themselves as trustees of other's time and to us. And so we're not saying that everything should be, should be fast, should be easy. But they're good about sort of understanding, well, when I send out a, back to my 1266 word email, when I send that out, what's the math? How much time am I taking from people who would read this email? And so to us, that's what being a friction fixer is, is somebody who is aware of, given what we call the cone of friction, Given the people that they can influence, what can I do to reduce a necessary burden on them and also to put necessary burdens? And the example that we've been using lately is in the book, and I don't know what they call this in Australia, but in the United States, you may remember the California Department of Motor Vehicles, where you probably had to go to to get a driver's license or something.

Damon Klotz: I did, yeah, I was in my mid twenties and after thinking I could drive, I had to go to a driving test and a written test and go to the DMV, but here we just have the Department of Transport and Main Road, so kind of similar.

Bob Sutton: Kind of, so that was in. Well, 2019 was viewed as the most broken of California, sort of like bureaucracies. And, and our governor in California appointed a guy to take it over his name, Steve Gore, Steve Gordon and turn it around. But when we work on the book, I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the same one where I took my test when I was 15 and a half years old to get my driver's permit. So I've, I've been going there a long time, 55 years, and I had a great experience and was completely confused how it quickly got in and out. And the reason was there was a gentleman who called a greeter whose job it was, was to go up and down the line and see why we were there and to help us get in and out as quickly as possible to give us forms to fill out, to weed people out of line who. Couldn't get a passport at the DMV, for example. So I was wondering, what's happening at the DMV? And then we found this guy, Steve Gordon, who is the new head of the Department of Motor Vehicles and has made all these things easier. all these things you can do online, you couldn't do before, and they've had all these changes in morale. And so the reason I like that is everything from the guy who was, just, you know, touched the 60 of us in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles versus Steve Gordon, who's in charge of the whole thing. And by the way, what he did in the first year he was on the job is he drove to all 180 field offices. In the whole system, that's 50, 000 miles on his car to sort of figure out what was wrong with the system and to gain trust and so forth. So, to me, that even though, if you fast forward 5 years, they've made enormous changes. The system is so much better. I can't believe it. It still has problems, but for a 5 year gain in a huge system that almost all Californians are touched by in 1 way or another, it's just sort of remarkable. But, The important part about that in terms of being friction fixers and being trustees of others time, whether it was one person who could influence 60 of us or Steve Gordon, who can influence tens and tens of millions of people and thousands of employees, people do what they can to make things better in their zone of influence, their cone of friction. And to me, that's what great friction fixers do.

Damon Klotz: Why I like, I love examples like, and for the non Americans listening, like, you probably won't understand how, how, Friction, heavy, the DMV experience could have

Bob Sutton: Oh, it's still tough, but it's much better.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, like, and it's, it's, it's one of those examples where it's like, actually shout out, I learned how to drive in California around Stanford cause the roads are flatter and a bit easier. So I didn't crash my friend Juliana's car, who's a Stanford alum. So shout out to Juliana. But I remember, you know, it was such a proud moment for me when I got my California's driver's license and the people who work there actually have a chance to do really high impact work where it is a, you've got customers coming in who are potentially quite stressed and nervous and you have a chance to either amplify the nervousness and make their day worse. Or to have an experience where you actually could, and to sort of tap into Will Guadera's work on unreasonable hospitality, you could really go the opposite way and be so kind and so caring to that experience and actually say, we are doing high value work here and you completely change the system there.

Bob Sutton: Yeah. And, and to move to another setting, to me, that's the difference between great doctors and nurses and healthcare. We, and we've all been there that, that the ones who add tension to you versus they just, you just sort of just calm down. So, so to me, that's one of the emotional parts of that. When you're, you're in a setting where everybody's tense. Everybody's angry and everybody's paranoid and they're not being cooperative. It's actually, it's just harder for everybody to get their work done. And we all know that in a situation where there's a client and then there might be, it could be a law firm, it could be a healthcare setting, it could be going to the local shop, that, when there's tension between the boss, the employees, and customers, nothing quite works. Think of a great Restaurant versus a terrible restaurant experience. And then when everybody sort of contributes together, it's, it's just always just a much better sort of situation. so anyways, but we all know that.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, but yet it still becomes hard to do, like because of employee experience and the conditions and people's sense of worth in the job and all these other things, which is why like talking about culture is not this like, you know, soft, fluffy thing. It's literally how work gets done inside of companies. I want to bring in the world of improv and to help leaders Who you're like, how do you make these connections? You're like, I know Bob's doing a bit of analysis on Damon's brain. He's like, how does

Bob Sutton: Well, I, I, I've been interviewed by, by, you know, the folks from Second City already, so I, yes, and let's go.

Damon Klotz: Yes. And so that was, that was the connection point I wanted for the leader who is probably a leader who knows that they could probably implement a little bit of more like healthy frictions and good friction, but the default in their team is yes, yes, not yes and. And because the end is scary because end might mean that people are worrying about respect or how to disagree or how do you push back? So what role does yes and play in a team that feels like they're just being quite nice with each other and like needing a little bit more friction this year?

Bob Sutton: Ooh, well, not, you know, not, we're, there's different kinds of friction. The, the yes, and to me, well, there's two kinds of friction. One, one element of that is the, well, what are we doing too fast? Where do we have to slow down? And a lot of that to me is, let's start out with clients, is finding out where people are upset or angry. Like there's that. so there's that. There's also another part about this, which is, and we don't talk about this kind of friction that much in the book, but it's something that we, you and I started out talking in the beginning, which is constructive conflict. And so the question is, how do you, as a leader, create a situation where people will argue with you? And the best I can say to leaders is that it isn't just a matter of saying it. It's a matter of, kind of modeling it. I just reminds me of a story. So in 2008, so Huggy and I had the privilege of interviewing Brad Bird, Brad Bird's, the Academy of Winning, director of all three Incredibles movies of Ratatouille at Pixar. And it was actually, He was actually on the Academy Award run for Ratatouille. And he was really wound up and just, he was just talking. He was really fun to talk to. and he described how, essentially to make a great film, he's got to create a situation. Where people will argue with him, will push back to them. And he said, and just saying it isn't enough. He told us a story about one of his more obscure, but people, some people say his best film, a film called Iron Giant. And he was brought in to take over a broken production. And he said, I was brought in and he said, the whole team, they were like abused children. It's like, they were just, and he literally, Brad Bird, and they were like crunched up. They were just like in pain. And he said, so we're making the movie. And he, and he said, you know, I'm like sketching things out. Cause you know, like they do like the boards that you do when you do a movie. And he said, we had to go in and make the movie. And he said, I kept saying to them, I kept saying, so it's okay to argue with me. You know, when two people agree. One of them is unnecessary. Please push back to me. I'm not that smart. I need your help. So he said, they sat there looking at me for 10 days, just quaking. And I said, he said, I kept looking at them. And finally he said, on day 12, somebody raised their hand and argued with me a little bit. And so he said, what I did was I said, I just added a little bit. And he said, and then I said, come on, just a little bit more than he said. Once I got them to the point where it was psychologically safe, and he said it in about another week, we were just all yelling at each other in this, this phrase of sort of like loving conflict, which is a very Pixar sort of quote, and I love that sort of story because people say, oh, well, we're just going to have constructive conflict now, and Brad really was describing a situation Where it took a long time in saying it wasn't enough. He had to model the behavior. So that's where the yes and part comes in that. Yes, you can say it and you have to do it too. If you want it to actually happen in your organization, because the natural tendency, when there's power differences is for us not to challenge the more powerful person and nearly all of us are raised that way. And it's contrary to many cultures. And as you know, in great organizations, people argue in an atmosphere of mutual respect. But boy, it's tough to sustain.

Damon Klotz: The power of that story is that it doesn't just have the impact of what does it mean for that team working on that film. It actually means that those people have witnessed what that looks like and they can take it to every other film that they work on. And it actually has that huge ripple effect.

Bob Sutton: So another related Brad Bird story is, so there's a, a producer he has worked with for years. I'll think of his name in a minute and him and Brad have made many movies together. And the way that he described working with Brad is every day it was loving conflict. And, and, and the way the basics argument was always the same argument, which was Brad didn't care about money. Didn't care about a schedule. He just wanted to make things perfect. and the producer's job is to finish the thing on time and on budget, right? and so at one point, they're having this, this argument about budget. And so what, and I can't believe I can remember the guy's name, but the executive producer gives Brad. And Brad doesn't read he doesn't think about money. He gave Brad 100 pencils. And what he would do with Brad when Brad wanted to do something, he'd say, so Brad, is that worth 11 pencils? You'll only have 89 left. And I thought, compared to a spreadsheet, for somebody who's a visual thinker, I thought that, and that was on The Incredibles. That was what they did. That was one of the most amazing sort of stories that I heard. And that to me, that's loving conflict. It's like, here's your pencils. How, how many is this worth to you? I thought that was fabulous.

Damon Klotz: I love that example. It reminds me of, um, I think I heard Huggy say this in an interview about one of the ideas for how we can change meeting culture is, give meeting credits. Where you only get so many credits to meet with your, your team and your organization each week. And you're like, is this worth the credit? And you're like, well, actually, no, it can probably be an email. You're like, cool. We're not wasting credits on that.

Bob Sutton: Yes. That's, I think that's pretty cool.

Damon Klotz: So I'm going to make one of the hardest transition points I've ever had to do on the history of this show, which is going from Pixar to arseholes.

Bob Sutton: Every organization has some assholes. Even Pixar has some, anyway.

Damon Klotz: So one of the, there's many stories I remember from working in Silicon Valley. One was this sort of famous thing about not tolerating brilliant jerks. And especially in sales organizations and engineering cultures. If someone has great results, but makes everyone else around them, you know, just feel terrible about themselves and their work and their sense, then it's like, that's not worth it. And your book on this, you know, the no arsehole rules become a bit of a workplace, you know, cult classic. one, thank you for using language that resonates with people so that people read it. And two, why do you think this deeply resonated? Because I think we all know that we work with people that have made it hard, but maybe we don't talk about it.

Bob Sutton: Well, I, I, first of all, I still am bewildered myself why it resonated. and, uh, So I think it's about a million copies worldwide, which is more than all my, all my other books combined. And, uh, the, the other thing just for aspiring authors out there, there's two things they tell you to do when you write a, write a book like mine that, that's supposed to be a workplace book. One is you're supposed to get these blurbs, all these famous people who blurb your book. That book has no blurbs because nobody famous would blurb it because of the swear words. And they also tell you to have endnotes, and it has no endnotes either, so, so I've sort of, all my other books do, by the way, maybe I just haven't sold as much. Do think that part of it was the title, the No Asshole Rule. Although I wanted to call it the No Arsehole Rule in the UK, but they wouldn't let me. But some of it is just the title that it's just sort of shocking and the like, but I do think that there's this notion that all of us who have been in the workplace any period of time have had the experience of having, a customer, a peer, and especially if you look at the evidence, a boss Who treats us badly. And in this, in this old idea that it's, the boss the next person up the hierarchy, no matter what you say, that's the person who has the biggest effect on us. There's all sorts of evidence. I mean, Google had some famous research about this, but long before Google, the evidence that people quit bosses, not organizations is very strong, and also Gallup has great data, that the average quality of management in an organization is probably more important than the quality of the CEO, for example. So the quality of bosses is very important, but just that, that idea that, that when you have a, have a boss in particular who treats you like dirt or a really important customer could happen as well. It just drives you nuts. And then if you look at the academic literature, which we're not going to go into in massive details, but when, when people feel demeaned and, disrespected and de energized by, an interaction or a long term relationship they have with people, the evidence that they get less creative, less motivated, they quit, they get sick, they can't sleep. They have trouble at home. The, the evidence is just overwhelming. So our argument is that yes, there are some people possibly so brilliant that, the organizations, uh,succeed despite rather than because of them. But, the damage that is done to you, uh, when you, work with a jerk or you are a damage you do as a jerk, is, Just really quite devastating. So and back to what my dissertation advisor, Bob Kahn, taught me that, if you're an asshole and you win, in my book, you're still a loser because of all the damage that you do to other people. And I'm not sure that capitalists always agree with me. but that's the, argument that I really sort of live by

Damon Klotz: It definitely sounds like that, that advisor, Bob, was the first person who said use direct language. Direct language is like, that seemed to be, you know, like if you win and you make people feel bad, you're still a loser. And you're like, yep, I'm going to take that one day and write a book about the

Bob Sutton: No, no, my, my advisor, Bob Kahn, hardly ever swear. I hate to say it, but I, you know, I was raised by a gritty and not overly successful entrepreneur, who, uh, worked on my, I probably, my dad was the one who said to me, boy, did my dad swear a lot? Anyways, there was one F bomb after another one from my dad. So it was an unfortunate side effect of my flawed child raising probably.

Damon Klotz: Well, if only your dad knew that that would inspire 1 million books to be sold, then he's like, maybe, maybe it worked.

Bob Sutton: Yeah. Who knows? Anyway,

Damon Klotz: So I would love to get your take on if there's early warning signs that a workplace culture is allowing or even rewarding sort of toxic behaviors and

Bob Sutton: What? Oh, oh, so I love this question and, so in some ways, like there's, there's lots of stuff that runs through my work, but, and you already touched on it actually, and, and maybe got there, but the diagnostic question that, that I like to ask is not, well are people kind of generally. Civilized, because most organizations, not all, people are just, you know, at least relatively polite or civil most of the time. But the question that I want to know is if somebody is a well known demeaning jerk and is a star, do they get ahead or And this happens a lot because power does bad things to people's minds. Or is it somebody who got ahead by being a really nice person, but then when they got in a position of power, they turned into a jerk because the power went to their head? That's one of the most reliable ways to turn people into jerks, to be insensitive, to be nasty, is to give them power and money. And this is one of the problems with the income and power inequality we're talking about at the outset. So the question I want to know is that when somebody is a star and a jerk, still, uh, sort of let them keep doing their dirty business because they're bringing in money, fame, whatever. And I'll give you a comparison. so, when was this? 14 years ago, 14 and a half years ago. So I needed heart surgery. Okay. And I investigated two options, neither one of these may mean much to people in Australia, but in the United States it might. One was my own,local hospital, Stanford Hospital, which is a mile and a half from my house.The other one was the Cleveland Clinic, which has the best numbers, which is in Cleveland. 2000 miles from my house and has the best risk adjusted mortality rate. So I, and I just, and I had a slowly, I had a heart valve that I was probably born with that had to be replaced. So, I did all this research between the two and what I figured out was there was a guy at Stanford who was the star surgeon Who, uh, by the way, just as an aside, had, more than 500 bullets of different size in his office between this big and I'm not kidding, like artillery shells. So that made very macho dude. And, uh, while I was waiting, it was two hours late for my appointment with him, his assistant spent the entire time telling me what an asshole he was. And I, I had a lot of evidence that he was an asshole and he was quite, anyway. So then I went to Cleveland and found it, and found this guy named Mark Gilanoff, who was a real nice guy and also had great numbers in terms of his risk adjusted board. He was supposed to be the best surgeon there. I got connected with him. And so I went to the surgery. I'm still alive, apparently at work. But what I found out from the then CEO, Toby Cosgrove, was at Stanford, we may even reward people, surgeons who are jerks. We certainly let them get away with it, especially if they're famous. But what Toby Cosgrove said to me, well, at the Cleveland Clinic, we have a team based approach and, uh, if you are an asshole, we fire you no matter how great a surgeon you are. And, and in fact, I, I, I got to give a talk, it was actually about one of my later books, Good Boss, Bad Boss, but I got to give a, give a talk about the no asshole related stuff at the Cleveland Clinic. That was kind of funny. And I did it for free since they saved my life. I'm not going to charge them. uh, but to me, that, that diagnostic question, which you can go back to Microsoft, that under the old Steve Ballmer approach, basically assholes finished first, that was the system, including Ballmer, who is not a great person, by the way, and then you have Satya under the system. Like you're, if you act like that, you get kicked out of the system. If the coaching doesn't help you. So to me, that's, I mean, this is, this is very simple. This is stuff we probably learned in grade school. Anyhow, so that's, that's kind of where I'm at with this perspective.

Damon Klotz: And it's why leaders and like, you know, like the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, knowing that that is like a rule that gets implemented and that people have the trust and authority to remove people who don't sort of operate in that way, because that story permeates the entire culture. But then also those people go on to work at other places and the behaviors that help them succeed, allows them to succeed and change cultures. And in that place, it's the, you know, like you said, it's the person who gets power for the first time in an organization. They look around and they say, well, it seems like everyone else operates with this kind of evil mentality that like the power has gone to their head. So that's the leader I need to be, because clearly that's what gets rewarded here. And then they leave and go to other places. And we have this permeating of culture. So it's like, that's why it's so critical for like, especially early stage companies, is understand the type of culture and leadership values and how you reward and recognize early, because it has long tail effects that you might not even know about.

Bob Sutton: Yeah. So, I mean, it's a sort of double down on that. One most amazing things, and it's not like I knew Steve Jobs well personally, but I spent a lot of time with Ed Catmull in particular the last seven or eight years that he was running Pixar. He was the co-founder of Pixar and was the president for about 25 years. And one of the things he talked about, well he had two things in common. To say about jobs were interesting. The first Steve Jobs, and he met Steve Jobs once a week for 25 years, at least, so he really knew Jobs and Jobs was his boss. Was that his first argument was that Jobs was sometimes known as an asshole and some people would say that, but what, what Ed argued quite vehemently was it was the asshole Steve Jobs who got fired by Apple. And went out of business at Next. And it was the one who went through the, the dark period of his life and came out as a more, as a nicer person, as a result of, so there's that argument and the other argument, which is a cultural argument, which I would finally got Ed to admit, not in writing, but in person, is I said, so when I talked to my friends who work at Apple, they say that jobs can still be kind of nasty there so Ed said to me, well, we've always had a really nice civilized culture at Pixar. And he said, so the power of the, of the culture is so strong here that we get a nice version of Steve Jobs here because he comes in the door and he says, oh. This is a culture where you have to be nice. So to get things done, he's somebody who's really nice. And when, when you talk to people, um, who work at Pixar, a lot of times we'll talk about all the attaboys and encouragement they got from jobs that they didn't expect because of his reputation of being a jerk. but that's another thing of the power of culture that, that Pixar had such a civilized culture could make Steve Jobs nice.

Damon Klotz: Which shows the importance of knowing who you are and what you stand for, you know, and like organizations who get created and really don't have strong mission, vision values, and don't have values that become behaviors and have a culture that can be easily documented and shared with employees means that if someone does come in with, huge personality or large, larger than life presence or celebrity status. They can come in and just bulldoze an entire weak system because it doesn't stand for anything versus Steve walked into that room. It sounds like, and saw what Pixar was and what Pixar stands for and goes, look, we know that you are brilliant in these ways, but also we have an entire ecosystem here that is operating in this way that you need to be part of.

Bob Sutton: Okay. So that's really a great point. And so I, we, we've been talking more about the, the senior folks, but, when you talk about what great leaders do, and this is not just for asshole stuff, this is for all bad behaviors in cultures that operate effectively. I mean, because one of the problems with the term asshole, even though it does sell books, so I like that, but one of the problems with the term asshole is it's, sort of implying that somebody is, that personality is fixed and that situations are fixed, that people are, they're either assholes or they're not. But all of us, I would argue, and I even have this phrase, assholes are us, that there's all sorts of situations where people act like jerks. And in fact, social scientists can do this. All you got to do is get a person in a hurry, have them be sleep deprived, have them being around a bunch of assholes. There's a whole bunch of reliable ways to turn people into jerk. Time pressure and sleep deprivation are excellent if you want to turn people into jerks. But so in great organizations, what happens is that when people, if you will, transgress and engage in bad behavior, what their bosses do is they call them out. Relatively quickly and have the gentle, caring conversation backstage and tell them, this is not acceptable behavior. So at the end of my second book on assholes, which didn't sell as well, but might be a better book, the Asshole Survival Guide, I talk about this notion that I had a department chair, his name's Peter Glynn, a nice Canadian guy. And, uh, I actually lost it with a student and yelled at him. I could go through all my justifications about why he was such a destructive force, but I was unkind to him and I put it in writing, to the student, afterwards and, uh, my department chair, Peter Glynn, called me aside, told me my behavior was unacceptable. And told me I had to apologize to them, to this guy. And I, I apologized to him in writing and in person, and it was kind of painful, but it's, you know, it's, kind of ironic or maybe appropriate that the asshole guy in this case was an asshole. And, uh, I am fortunate enough to have a caring boss at this time named Peter Glenn, who called me out on it and made me apologize. And to me, that's a sign that, under his leadership, that our department, that's what the no asshole rule looks like is he called me out and told me my behavior was inappropriate and he was right. So to me, that's, that's to your point. It isn't just personality. There's a system, a set of norms, and everybody understood that when Peter was our boss, that's what the rules were.

Damon Klotz: Yeah. And it's like, it's kind of like a contextual mirror that you can hold up behavior to. It's not just any mirror where you look like in any setting. It's a mirror that's contextually relevant to the type of place that it's placed in. And it's like, this is what we look for. And this is how you look. And like, there is a discrepancy between these. So want to land the plane with two interesting things.

Bob Sutton: As we try, like, make another hard pivot here. fine.

Damon Klotz: Your work, I think really cuts through and resonates with people. And you've clearly thought a lot about workplace culture and what great could look like. So if someone's listening and they're like, you know what, like underneath a lot of the things I've heard in this episode, I feel like I do want to actually transform my culture. I feel like there's some things that I need to work on. Do you have like a couple of non-negotiables for what great workplace culture looks like?

Bob Sutton: Well, I guess,we've already talked about the no asshole rule, but, there is another sign to that, which is, you know, and I'm, I'm stealing a page from, Kim Scott's Radical Candor which is that, to me, what great cultures look like, and it's, it's hard because we're busy and it's uncomfortable, but what happens in great cultures, and this is back to Peter Glynn, I was just talking about this, is that they don't let things fester, and by they, I mean we together, and this idea of accountability, Huggy and I sometimes has defined it as the feeling that I own the place and the place owns me. And that's when I've been in a great high performance type team. It's where you pull people aside and you have the conversations and you nip problems in the bud. And there's another side of this. This is, uh, Amy Edmondson of psychological safety. Fame, one of our earliest papers. And it's, it's, I I've known, I've known Amy so long that I realized I wrote her a promotion letter for Harvard business school, 30 years ago, 35, 30 years. So I just found it and sent it to her cause I saw her last week, but Amy, one of our earliest papers talks about this idea. That in great actually healthcare, settings that the best nurses are what she calls noisy error makers. So they not only point out other people's flaws when they make a mistake, or they do something wrong, what they do is they tell, you know, not like running around screaming, you have to do it the right time. They let everybody know about it. For two reasons. One is so that this, everybody can learn from their mistake individually. And the other reason is to set the norm that when we make mistakes, we don't hide them. We use it as an opportunity for collective learning. and I, I think that's almost the essence of what a psychologically safe culture would look a lot, look like when people talk openly about their mistakes and errors and try to create a situation where people learn together. And boy, that's hard to do. I've seen it for moments in time and we're going to say, I saw it in IDEO at the peak years, Pixar, maybe at the peak years, Google at a certain point, but it's really hard to sustain.

Damon Klotz: Yeah. And you know, those companies, like I said, that they reached that inflection point where they become so successful that nearly the things that got them there sometimes slow them down and they need to navigate. How do they keep some of the things that make them them, but also, know how to change effectively at the right time. So this episode has been full of really actionable things, some great stories. I've got, I reckon there might be two types of people listening to this. The type of people who are going to be like, that's really cool. I know what to do with some of these things. I feel inspired. Bob, I want to, I want to hone in on maybe the second type of person, which is someone who's listened to this episode and said, nah, my company's a mess. I can't fix it. It's full of bad tension. There's no good tension. It's riddled with assholes. And. Our mutual friend Amy Gallo said that you're a member of the Always Browner Club, so if someone's listening to this and think the grass might be greener somewhere else and that they can't fix their company, do you have advice?

Bob Sutton: Well, let's talk about that. The always browner. Let's talk about that a little bit. I think that's a little bit of an overstatement. I do think that there are situations in life that might be so screwed up, so cruel that you should quit. And I'm actually a big believer in quitting. Well, I'm a big believer in quitting. So long as, uh, As you can afford it and your family isn't going to starve and you're like, like you've got to be strategic, like just walking out the door and saying, F you, that's all over. Like that looks good in the, in Hollywood, but in life, it's sometimes, it's sometimes a problem, but the other part about it, and this is more of the ordinary workplace thing, and this is one of, one of my arguments, and I think I can show it empirically is that every organization that I've ever known of in my life. Is messed up, is screwed up in its own special way. And, and sometimes there's this feeling that if only I could go to another organization, it would be perfect. And, and even it is an unfortunate part, and I've committed this sin in this, as well is we'll, we'll sort of idolize and talk about great companies and great leaders. But every place is messed up in its own way. And I know this from when I've gone from one university to another. and the grass is browner story, which Amy might be referring to is that a long time ago, 10 years ago, I was doing a scaling talk and I was talking about how organizations are messed up in its own way. And so it's this large law firm. And it's a partner retreat. So this is the top 200 or so partners of this big, uh, law firm. and this guy walks up to me and he said, so I'm a member of the Grass is Browner Club, and I said, huh? And so it's like partners, like they have like the partners who went to Harvard. You have like the women partners, the black partners, that is affinities group. The Grass is Browner Club were the people who left this law firm. Went somewhere else and was even worse than they came back. and I really like that because everything is sort of messed up in its own special way. And I would go back to the notion, and since I've been celebrating Ed Catmull so much, I'm looking for the book, but I can't, this book, but I can't find it here. If I think if I was going to nominate the best book ever written overall as a management book, and there's a leadership book, a culture book, a story book, I would pick Ed Catmull's Creativity Incorporated. I just, I'm a huge fan of that book. So I'm the Pixar one day and I was there giving a talk about something. And so I ran into a guy at the cafeteria. And he said, Oh, and I had the book in my hand because Ed had signed it for me. I was all excited. And he said, Oh, that's such a great book. This is at Pixar. And he said, Oh, that's such a great company. He said, I wish I worked there. And he said, well, it's mostly right, but you know, there's, there's some dirt that isn't in there. And that, and it's true. And this is not anything. This is true of every place. So, so all of us, the life isn't perfect. And that's an argument that sometimes it might be worthwhile trying to make things better. And to go back to the Department of Motor Vehicles at the state of California, if they can get better, I bet your company can too.

Damon Klotz: Micro moment. And like that story about, yeah, Ed saying, what, what a great place. I wish I had the chance to work there. It's so interesting. Cause it's like everyone who read that book and one of my really close friends, Caitlin Holloway was actually in the room when that book was being written and she was transcribing meetings at Pixar and she's now a, People and Culture Exec and a Venture Capitalist and she, she saw it firsthand and yeah, you know, like that experience of it all looks good on paper, makes for a great story, but like every company is going to have a version where you have to get in the mud and it's going to be hard.

Bob Sutton: Yeah. Yeah. Life's not always beautiful, neat, and organized. It's just messy and ugly sometimes. That's how it is.

Damon Klotz: Well, Bob, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you for your humor, your energy, your stories. any parting words or do you want to just drop the mic?

Bob Sutton: Oh, no. I mean, my, my only, parting word just for all of us is,If you're not sure what to do, slow down and, show a little caring and even, you know, what is it, non-romantic love or whatever for the people around you. 'cause at least, at least my experience is, is especially when I'm pissed off or harried or upset, or I think people are evil if I slow down and, actually,display authentic caring for them. It's amazing how much better they act and also how much better I act too. So if I was going to say one thing, that's sort of, I guess, the opposite of the no asshole rule. It works for reducing jerkdom in workplaces and it works for reducing destructive friction too. So those are the, I guess that's sort of my parting thought that I would just sort of end with.

Damon Klotz: Yeah. Give people 20 percent more grace and then give yourself at least 10 percent of the same grace that you give to others as we try and navigate the world of work.

Bob Sutton: All right.

Damon Klotz: Awesome. Bob, Thank you so much for trusting the process

Bob Sutton: Oh, it was so fun to talk to you. All right.