Interview with Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule

Jim

Welcome back to People Performance Radio. I'm your host, Jim Matheson. Steve "The Doc" Hunt and I are back from last week's SuccessConnect, which was the global performance and talent management conference put on by our sponsor, SuccessFactors. We were up there for I think the better part of two days, even three days, I mean we were there for the whole conference, but we had the whole studio set up there, and we got quite a few great interviews that we'll be sharing with you guys over the next handful of episodes.

For those of you that may be listening to our podcast for the first time, you can subscribe in iTunes by doing a search for "people performance" in the iTunes Music Store. You can also check us out on our website, you can listen to the episodes right there on www.successfactors.com/podcast, and check us out. Hopefully you guys will like it.

As we promised last week, today's gues is none other than Bob Sutton. Dr Steve got awfully excited with Bob on the show, I think I actually saw a twinkle in Steve's eye, so we're not going to have any time for any news today, but we have a great interview, so all right, let's cut to the interview, Zak.

Zak

We're here with Bob Sutton, author of the "The No Asshole Rule" new book, it's actually not that new any more right, it's been out for what?

Bob

For more than a year, yeah.

Zak

I actually saw it at the San Francisco Airport a couple of weeks ago.

Bob

Oh good, I'm glad they're still stocking it.

Zak

It was right there in the front.

Bob

There's no shortage of assholes in the airport.

Zak

No, there aren't! There's a lot of people there that need to read it, that's for sure.

Bob

They need to do TSA screening.

Zak

All right, so why don't you go ahead and jump in?

Steve

Well, Bob —may I call you Bob?

Zak

Please.

Steve

First of all, it's a great honor to have the chance to meet you, I'm familiar with your work, and just found out that Bob also has a background in industrial organizational psychology, and published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, so for a nerd like me, his stature's just gone way up.

Bob

It was a kind of a sloppy methodological article, by psychology standards.

Zak

It doesn't matter the quality of the publications, it's just the number.

Steve

That's right! We were talking just briefly before we started, Bob, a little bit about, you look at this idea of assholes, and one of the things that I really like about it, and want to ask you a question about is, is one thing it gets people to realize, there's more than one aspect of performance, there's getting results and there's how you get it?

Bob

Oh yeah.

Steve

Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of how you think, why people sometimes tolerate high performers, even though they're assholes, is it just they've never really thought about it before?

Bob

I think there's two reasons: one is more of a value-based judgement on my part, and the other one I think is a little bit more objective. The value-based one is that there probably are some individual performers who bring in so much money, win so many games and staff, that even though they leave a trail of people who are demeaned and de-energized in their wake, that if you are only looking at the performance indicators of making money or winning games, probably are objectively worth it, and I hate to say that, but it probably is true, so the value-based part of my argument is that, as human beings, it is still possible to have high levels of performance in all sorts of systems without demeaning people, so we shouldn't tolerate that because it demeans our humanity, so that's a very value-based argument.

The other one, which I think is more consistent with the traditional capitalist view, which is one that I talked about at the speech today and is on my blog and in the book a lot, is that there are a lot of hidden costs that people don't realize to assholes, which is that they drive out expensive valuable people, they make staff costs more higher, that one characteristic of people who demean and de-energize people is that they undermine the ability of the organization to develop the best people, so there's a whole bunch of sort of hidden costs which, although you may just be focusing on hitting your quarterly sales targets, that is damaging the organization in the long term.

So one is more of a value-based argument and the other one is one that, there's actually growing literature, it first started in England as more of a political movement, but now you're starting to see, you're talking about economic journals, that there's a number of assistant professors who are trying to get tenure writing research on bullying, and they're starting to document some of the negative effects in a more convincing way.

Steve

Yeah, that's an interesting literature that's really grown and the whole looking at counter-productive work behaviors. I like the idea you could have a ROA, a return on assholes.

Bob

Return on assholes! —I like that.

Steve

One of the things you talked on there, and talking about what is an asshole, and you're talking about demeaning behaviors —when I used to, and I have a design personality and selection test, so when I first look at something like an asshole, I never really look at any adjective to describe a person, whether it's A player, like a good one or a bad one, so that's why I immediately think, well what exactly does that mean, in an observable behavioral fashion? So, because asshole's so subjective, if you're a New Yorker, what you think makes somebody an asshole might be different if you're somebody from Oklahoma.

Bob

Well, it is interesting, having thought about this literature, if I was going to be a good academic and try to figure out how to measure it, there's two kinds of approach. One is, the kind that I've seen a lot in the bullying behavior is to list behaviors, so there's these researchers, Laura Lee Keeshley is one of them, if I'm pronouncing her name right, who have this checklist of bullying behaviors, and they did actually a whole bunch of interesting longitudinal studies and interventions the Veterans Administration hospitals in the United States, and they actually have a list of 60 behaviors …

Steve

Really?

Bob

… and it's everything from glaring at people to physical violence, I mean it's unbelievable how long the list is, and they factor analyze it, and they get five clumps, and then sort of stealing from that, in The No Asshole Rule I've got a list that, in chapter one, if I can remember my own book, called "The Dirty Dozen", and that's sort of, I would describe it as an abbreviated (I can't find it in the book right now), as an abbreviated …

Zak

It's in there, I saw it in there, I saw it.

Bob

… we'll find it, is an abbreviated summary of that literature really, so everything from treating people as if they're invisible, to —oh thank you.

Zak

Page ten —The Dirty Dozen.

Bob

Yes, so personal insults, invading personal territory, withering email flames, rude interruptions, two-faced attacks, dirty looks —those sort of things which, if you start looking at the bullying literature, they tend to use those sort checklists, either to describe somebody as an abusive supervisor, or to describe sometimes what they call "mobbing", which is that's happening, it's sort of an infection throughout the entire workplace. But all those are actually very consistent with the behavioral-based perspective that pervades much of IO psychology makes a lot of sense, but they have the disadvantages you say of not being culturally-based, so we were talking about New York versus San Francisco, like teasing people and being sarcastic is, I think you can get away with it more in New York that you can in overly nice California, and so there are going to be sub-cultural differences.

But the other approach, which has some disadvantages and some advantages, the kind that I emphasize in the book is, "Do you feel that the targets feel de-energized and demeaned", would really be the effect, and the de-energized actually stole pretty much directly from an academic who does network analysis, his name's Rob Cross, he's at the University of Virginia, and he's not an IO psychologist, he's actually a network researcher, and he did these really interesting network analysis studies where, so the way network analysis works is that you don't interview the focal person or the node in the network, what you do is you interview all the people they interact with, so in some ways it's sort of like a 360 in that you get everybody's perspective on how much expertise does this person have, how much power do they have, and these different sort of perspectives on how the person's viewed in the network, and he threw in this one question, and the one question, just threw it in, which was, "After you talk to this person, do you feel as if you have more or less energy?", and then, I think he's got about 30 data sets now, and then he'll follow people to see what happens to them in their performance evaluations, are they promoted later, did they leave the firm, and the degree to which this one question is predictive amazes him, it's just one of those, one item sort of wanders, and so in talking with Rob, if I was going to do a two-item scale, I'd basically want to, and this is very 360-ish, you ask people in the network, "Does this person leave you feeling demeaned and de-energized", and if you've got the effect that everybody below them felt demeaned and de-energized, and the people above them never felt like that, they felt great, that suggests to me that they're kissing up and kicking down, for example.

Steve

That's an awesome example, that's something I can actually see companies using too, you could put that into a 360 survey, or some sort of evaluation, and it would be useful information, that does this person leave you feeling more energized or less energized.

One of the things that you touched on though, and the second one is how the person feels when you get on that slippery slope, in your presentations when you talked about it, that just because somebody calls someone an asshole doesn't necessarily mean that they are.

Bob

It's a term of endearment in some cultures!

Steve

Oh right, I suppose so! I was sort of thinking about this, and there's four reasons why in a workplace setting I think people call people assholes, and I'm curious in your thoughts, are all these legitimate, or some of them less legitimate? One is the personal attacks, which I think everyone agrees, there's no reason just to intentionally rip somebody's self-esteem apart and make them feel like a lesser human being, would you agree? —that makes you an asshole bar none, if you do that?

Bob

Yeah, then you might be following the stuff in the book, and you might be a certified asshole and do that all the time, or you might just be having, I've done that before, and had a bad day.

Steve

Just a bad day, but then I've also heard people call people an asshole because, well as an academic you've got to have seen a lot of this —the people, they don't really have what they call the social skills? —somebody will put an idea out there, and they will just give unfiltered critical evaluation of the idea, and they never thought that somebody might actually have their ego tied to the idea, and the problem isn't necessarily that, the person's not attacking the individual, they're attacking their idea, but some people are unable to disassociate themselves from their ideas. So they call the person an asshole, because you told me my idea was bad.

Bob

I think that's an interesting case because if, well first of all, in some ways I don't think that people like that would be intentionally assholes, in fact that's where the behavioral checklists come in, there would be no insulting at all, it would be attacking of ideas, and in a healthy culture, and I think that there's also sort of an evolution that happens, I'm thinking of especially doctoral students, where at least a healthy doctoral program, that people will actually be very critical of one another's ideas, with the real aim of feeling as if you're helped, but where it gets to be a fuzzy sort of whine, and the thinking of academia where I see this, if what people always are essentially saying, the subtext, and this gets to one of the definitions of assholes, I actually heard from a CEO, Paul Purcell, is, if the subtext is always, to the extent that you are different from my idea, your ideas are shit? That's where in academia, it actually is not listening, it's not open-mindedness, it's what it is is really sort of an egotistical thing, to the extent that your work and your assumptions are more distant from mine, sometimes it's just different, it doesn't even necessarily mean that they clash, then you are wrong, and therefore what I want to do is destroy your career, because I don't want people like you.

I think this happens in other sorts of contests for ideas, so on one hand, I guess I'm going to motivation, if the intent of the person is to support and develop them, I think some of the greatest people, and this is just academia, people who do any sorts of technical work, if it's like a journey of criticism, but also warmth and compassion where the goal is to develop the person, and I think of my great doctoral, since some of my greatest doctoral students, three of them in particular, they had careers as product designers, and the great thing about product designers, if they're good product designers, is they're always asking for and responding to criticism for their ideas, because they always want to iterate and make things better. So I have one doctoral student now in particular, Liz Gerber, it's a long story but she's going to the North Western Mechanical Engineering Department, even though she did an organizational kind of thesis, so she's interesting, but one reason I think she's been so successful as a doctoral student is, the only thing she ever complains about is I don't give her enough negative feedback, and that's not normal with a doctoral student!

Steve

I think what you're getting out though, part of it is that whether somebody could perceive feedback as negative is basically on their own self-confidence, but I really like that idea of, is your criticism based on, I want to make the idea better, or is it more that I ramp up my criticism, the more your idea maybe makes my idea look bad?

Bob

Right, or it's irrelevant, in fact, I don't know whether in your career you ran into, writing by this guy anyway, Carl Wyke, who's a really creative guy, he's now in Michigan, so Carl, who writes this really weird stuff, and he's sort of the guy who has the highest status in weirdness in our field all at the same time, which is a great place to be, and so Carl, who actually was trained in I think IO psychology or social psychology at Ohio State, he started out very traditional, and has got weirder and weirder, and so he wrote this article, and it doesn't matter what it's about, it's got a paragraph on the difference between generalists and specialists, and how specialists can be overly dangerous and his argument was that when a specialist runs into a new idea, usually it has one of three effects on them, it usually reinforces what they believe, or it's irrelevant, or it clashes with what they believe, so their only real reaction to new ideas can be their neutral reactions or negative reactions, so his argument is it's special so they're grumpy in the world.

Generalists are people who are weakly attached to their ideas, and they have a lot of ideas, so when a new idea comes, they tend to be the happier people in life, because when a new idea comes, well that means that they can expand their category or learn a new category, and they're always like, it actually points out, generalists and aren't all good, because what happens is, they just are so interested in everything and think everything is so wonderful, that in some ways they have no taste, if you will.

Steve

Bit like everything, I've a friend who's like that way with movies, he's a terrible person to get criticism on movies, because he likes everything.

Bob

Yeah, you can expand it, and Carl, who is the ultimate generalist, he reads virtually everything? One time, this is a classic thing, this is like rationed but it's incredibly entertaining, I'm talking to Carl, and Carl's like, "Carl, what've you been doing?" "I'm obsessed with eye blinking", so and the question was, you know how when people just anxiously blink their eyes more? —but he had found a study that, if you can get people to blink their eyes less, they'll feel less anxious, so the question is, does being anxious cause you to blink your eyes more? Or does blinking your eyes more cause you to be anxious? —that's a typical thing. Carl will spend two weeks obsessed with something like that.

Steve

How funny, there's things like cognitive behavioral therapies based on that idea, but I love that idea that we can put that into our SuccessFactors' coaching assistant, if somebody's having trouble with confidence, you'd say, "blink less"!

Bob

It actually is, speaking of performance evaluation in guides, it actually, as a psychologist you'll know this, the question is, "Does belief follow behavior, or does behavior follow belief?", and there's an argument, if you know that literature …

Steve

Yeah, it's a little of both.

Bob

… getting people to change their behavior, independently of what they believe or what they can do, will get them to change their attitudes a lot of the time.

Steve

It does, yeah.

Bob

And that's true about assholes too is, that if you put people in situations where, even though they may have a history of being jerks, they actually act civilized, they may actually start internalizing that being civilized is OK, and they can do it.

Steve

Yeah, I think that's true, I mean we've talked about that for customer service, literally say "smile", if you smile, it will start shaping your behavior, there's issues about something called "emotional labor", that if you fake it too much…

Bob

I wrote a, one of my early career things was, it was more ethnographical, a little bit of quantitive, we did a bunch of stuff on following Arly Hochchild, who was, emotional requirements is part of the job? —in fact, my co-author on that, Raff Ellie, is an industrial organizational psychologist from Ohio State, so I had a real IO psychologist …

Steve

I went to Ohio State from my grad school, yeah.

Bob

Oh you did, really?

Steve

Yeah, go box! I have one other question about, and another reason why I think a lot of employees perceive their bosses to be assholes, and this is where it gets to again, is the subjectivity, is unrealistic, what they perceive to be unrealistic expectations, like my boss wants me to work all weekend on this, what an asshole.

Bob

Well, somebody who ruins your life could easily be called an asshole!

Steve

And then the boss is like, "But you're working for me, or I'm going to work the weekend" —for somebody out there who knows that they are a pretty demanding boss, and they expect a lot, I think if you expect something, would you agree with this one? —if you expect people to do other things you're not going to do yourself, that kind of immediately makes you an asshole —"I want you to work the weekend, so I can go sailing" —that's probably bad, but what would be the advice you'd say for a boss to say, if you're very demanding, how can you be demanding without coming across as being an asshole?

Bob

Well, I think that's actually a good question in general, that there's a difference between being tough or having a tough job, and we were talking about this in the round table a minute ago, or giving people tough feedback versus being demeaning, and to me a lot of it has to do with the attitude that it's coated in, and also the amount of respect that you have for the person.

There's also another part of this, I'll tell you a quick story that illustrates that, so in the course of this book I've had an amazing number of varied media interviews, and one thing that's become very clear to me is that maybe the nastiest business on earth is television, because there's so much demand in the ratings and it's so public, and so I was talking to a producer and writer from one of the famous networks, I'd better not say it!

Zak

You almost said it —I think he started with an A.

Bob

No, that actually isn't good.

Zak

OK. Steve and I got it narrowed down.

Bob

I almost said it, but it was not it, and so she described the difference between her asshole anchor, and the one who is merely tough, so the one who's really tough, so she walks in, she brings in the script, and he looks at her, says "Thank you", goes through, rewrites 75% of it, and goes, "This needs a lot of editing —could you put these in shape and get it back to me?", and she's like, "There's performance pressure —we're on the air in half an hour, and the guy's just changed 75% of the script!", and then the guy who's an asshole, and she said she kept claiming she had the evidence of the burnt carpet and everything, she brings him the script, he's smoking (it's against the rules to smoke in the building, by the way), and he crosses out two-thirds of it, and writes "This is shit" on it, and flicks his cigarette at her. I do think that, that although actually, she said, "In many ways I had to rewrite two-thirds of what he was going to read in both cases", but that's like an extreme case, and you can be an asshole in a much more subtle way, but there's a difference between being tough and being demeaning, and I do think, and I think this is part of the whole SuccessFactors' story, is that effective leaders do model the right behavior, and in fact one of the things we were just talking about in this round table that we came from, and this is not on assholes, it's just on that the people, the HR executives who are having the most trouble would be the people who would be members of top management teams where they would be insisting that everybody below them do the 360s, and go through the SuccessFactors' process, but they would never get around to doing it themselves on themselves, so that's a general problem for leaders and that's way beyond assholes, it's the behavior that you model, and I saw that when one of the organizations that I work with, well Cisco is one of the ones that's quite famous, is that everybody, including John Chambers, is expected to fly coach and they can fly business class by doing an international trip, and John Chambers, he can pay out of his own pocket if he wants to fly, to upgrade, but that's all that Cisco will pay for him or for anybody else.

Steve

It's interesting, because one of the things when you're talking about this, it makes me realize what makes somebody an asshole, from what your conversation is —a lot about not being an asshole is following basic rules that are supposed to apply to all of us, so a lot of these are social mores, that you're supposed to treat people civilly, and if you do this story here, you're saying this, I'm reminded of some of the big clossally stupid things some very high profile leaders have done recently, and I'm reminded that my brother told this story of a researcher who took, and he was a surgeon, and he too was famous, and you've talked about having this, more prone to assholitis, or whatever …

Bob

Or whatever it is!

Steve

… and I know a lot of great surgeons so … , but this person used part of their grant to buy a home entertainment system.

Bob

What —wow!

Steve

Which is unlawful, but what my brother was not understanding was, how could you be so stupid? —it's not a stupid person, he's a very bright person, and they got caught, and he was talking to another friend of his, and he said, "Well, you don't understand, you see, you don't understand with this person that you're obviously not sort of at this level of being an academic genius, because if you were, you'd understand that those rules only apply to other people, they don't apply to us", so I think part of, you might wonder if you could find a correlation between companies that sort of, like Enron or whatever, that I suspect had its share of assholes in it? —that allowing somebody to be an asshole is basically saying, "Look, if you accomplish these results, the rules don't apply to you."

Bob

Well, this is one of the things that I talk about a little bit in the book, but on my blog there's a lot more stuff, is the research on the way that power affects people, and it's quite well documented with lab studies, and you can imagine, it's one thing to do this in the lab with a short manipulation, but if you're somebody who is constantly told you're world-renowned, you're the most valuable person, we couldn't do anything without you, and you're constantly in positions where you're the most powerful person in the room, so the effects are pretty clear, and it's actually just like the story with your researcher there, which is that when people are in positions of power, they tend to be more focused on satisfying their own needs, less focused on the needs of others, and they act like the rules don't apply to them, and it's one of those things that you can produce automatically, and in fact there's this researcher, Dr Keltner, who's at Berkeley, I read an article by him recently, he's done a lot of this basically, "power and how it makes you stupid" stuff, and his argument is that giving people power is like a form of brain damage, because in addition to all that other stuff, he argues that it leads to a lower level of information processing about many decisions, that sounds a lot like your surgeon, "It's all about me and I don't have to think about it very much."

Steve

You sort of rewrite political history based on this, I think.

Bob

Yeah, or just look at it, and say, "Oh yeah, that works."

Steve

The last question that I have is, related to this, do you think assholes are the classic nature versus nuture, are assholes made or born?

Bob

Maybe because it's of my essentially social psychological background, but I'm sure there are some people who maybe have some genetic strains that may be make them nastier, they come from difficult family backgrounds, there's some evidence from some studies in Norway, they have a very good longitudinal study of high school bullies, that high school bullies are more likely to come from poor backgrounds that use corporal punishment, and from split families, and then they're more likely to serve time in gaol later on, these great longitudinal studies by this guy, Dan Oliewis , and so there is some evidence there that your background can have an effect, but at least my sense is, and this is from looking at research on emotional contagion, research on the effects of power in particular that, if you get in a situation where there's a bunch of people who are demeaning and nasty, and they're sort of, "I win, you lose", sort of ultra-competitive situation, then you're going to catch the asshole fever, because emotions are extremely contagious. Then the other part about it is, when it's an extremely competitive, I win, you lose, situation, then it's actually rational behavior to leave other people feeling demeaned and de-energized because that's how you get ahead.

So it's interesting, back to the round table that we just got, there was some folks there who had worked at GE and another company, and I was asking them, "So how does this ABC ranking thing work at GE?", and sometimes I can be cynical about it, but they said, the one thing that did make it work, or one of the things that made it work, was the definition of an A player was somebody who didn't stomp on others on the way to the top, they were somebody who helped others succeed and developed others, and you can see the difference between a, I win, you lose, environment where only one person comes out on top, and they've stomped on others, well they're leaving others feeling demeaned and de-energized as rational behavior versus somebody who gets to the top by helping others succeed, and they were talking about that it was actually, because the focus is, General Electric are very competitive, but they were being ultra-competitive about who could be more helpful and develop more people, which, that didn't sound bad to me at all.

Steve

I'm nicer than you!

Bob

And the question is, how many of your direct reports would be A players, how many of them would be picked for other development opportunities, and then one of the things that she said and specific, I thought this was really interesting, was when they move people around in General Electric, they move them around a lot —how many of your direct reports want to follow you? I thought that was a pretty good —and that's a good objective measure, actually.

Steve

Well that's what I was thinking when you talking about that, what you need to make that work is you need some way to measure how supportive people are for us, I've always thought that organizations should really reward somebody, to me it's the most selfless act, promoting people past them. If somebody promotes someone past them, it's like, what greater sign of an awesome developmental leader but most organizations don't really recognize that.

Bob

That's like, "You've screwed up the contest."

Steve

Yeah, you've really put your ego to the side when you do something like that.

Bob

So it's interesting, so there's this guy named Paul Purcell who's CEO of a company called Baird, which has a no asshole rule, and so actually he and Loris were both interviewed on CNN together, so the two no asshole CEOs? —and Baird is like, the no 39 in the best place to work LS, and they're doing very well financially, and so Loris and this guy Paul Purcell were the two, literally on the, if you go to Fortune it says, "Baird —no 39 —they brag about their no asshole rule", that's all it says, so of course I immediately got in contact with Paul Purcell, and at first it's Head of HR, I wrote something, I put it on my blog, and then I interviewed him, and he'll be in, a paperback of this is coming out I think in about six months, and there's going to be a new chapter, and this'll be one of the things in it, and so I asked him what an asshole was, and it was a somewhat different approach than we've been talking about? —so his perspective of somebody who is an asshole, and he says, he looks during initial interviews, and heard me say this, and he says, "If you're an asshole, I'm going to fire you", and this is like, Aaargh! So anyway, with Paul Purcell, the way he defines it is, number one, do you put your interests ahead of the company's, and number two, do you put your interests ahead of the co-workers', and to your point about somebody who would promote somebody above them that they thought were really great? —that to me is almost the definition of somebody who does the opposite of what Paul Purcell says is an asshole, somebody who really sees the star and promotes them.

But on the other hand, I would go back to your nature/nurture debate, or are assholes born or made? —if you're in an environment that encourages and allows you to develop and support other people, and you're admired for it, even if you're not the highest paid person as a result, that's a lot different than an environment where you're viewed as just stupid for doing that.

Steve

Assholes are assholes because they're allowed to be.

Bob

Yeah, or civilized —and the other way around too.

Steve

Well yeah, and I think it's interesting, what I think is also fascinating is you talked, and I didn't realize is how many companies had this sort of no asshole philosophy before you wrote this book, it was out there, there's even one of our partners, DDI, has the opposite, which is, I don't know really exactly what their value is, will do nothing to hurt people's self-esteem …

Bob

Oh, I love that.

Steve

… they will protect people's self-esteem, which is kind of a positive spin on it, it's a very touchy-feely psychology way of saying don't be an asshole.

Bob

But I mean, to that point in fact, one thing my colleague, Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote a book on evidence-based management, which is a longer and more serious book than this, it's called, "Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense", too long a title, but we spent a long time working on that book, and I completely lost my train of thought … what were we talking about?

Steve

We were talking about DDI's sort of view, how they put a positive spin on self-esteem, protecting your self-esteem —that was the last comment I made.

Bob

I completely lost it, anyway.

Steve

That's OK, that's a good book actually, evidence-based management.

Bob

Yeah, that's a completely different sort of book.

Steve

This is why we can edit these things.

Bob

Oh no, I've got it back. So you were asking, you said lots of organizations had no asshole rules, well in fact one of the themes of that book is, is something that I believe, there are very few new ideas in management, and/or in the behavioral sciences, and what good managers and good organizations do is they do stuff that's fairly obvious and has been known for a long time, so actually I notice at this conference there was a good to great thing going on right now, sort of Jim Collins type stuff, and I have kind of two reactions to the book, "Good to Great", which is, one reaction is, God, this stuff has been around for ever, it's incredibly obvious, and then these guys, Collins doesn't even cite all the research that supports it.

Then my second reaction is, I'm basically replaying an argument between Jeff Pfeffer and me, my co-author, so Pfeffer is, "So which ideas in the book are wrong?", and so if you applied every article that you knew of, even though the methods in Good to Great are actually methodologically questionable, it's like they have 11 organizations, you're talking about selecting on a dependent variable, there's all these problems, but if you reviewed the best evidence you could find, could you find anything wrong with this book, and it's a pretty good argument, because it's a very compelling case, obviously if you look at the market test, managers love it, it's one of the best-selling books maybe, I think it's the second best-selling management book of all time, the best being "In Search of Excellence", and it's this notion of mastering the obvious, there's a lot about what management is about, but it's not that easy to master it, I mean it takes a long time, it's hard, it takes relentlessness.

Steve

Yeah, I totally agree, I actually just wrote a whitepaper on this sort of common sense talent management, which is the basic kind of idea …

Bob

Oh really?

Steve

….same idea, yeah, it comes down to, a lot of this is just doing stuff we've always known we should have done, we just don't do it, people forget to do it, and I think of what SuccessFactors' technology, if you really look at what it does and why it works, is it just gets managers to do stuff they know they should do, and this is a lot about being a psychologist, you've got to relate to this, whenever he points them out in psychology, they're like, well of course, everyone knows that, well, if you knew that, how come you haven't been doing it?

Bob

So, the first management book I ever wrote was with the aforementioned Jeff Pfeffer, it's called "The Knowing Doing Gap", and it's the classic thing, that Jeff always jokes, because he's actually much more in control than I am, that I'm like the poster boy for all my behaviors, and I know what to do and don't do it, so it's something I'm living.

Steve

Well, this has been a fantastic interview, I've really enjoyed it. I think one of the things that I've really taken away, Bob, that I think people don't realize in this book is how much research it's based on, it's not just some person writing ideas, it's based on a lot of really solid empirical evidence, but you've, thankfully for the readers, have put it in a way that, you've written it differently to something that would appear in the Journal of Applied Psychology, it's actually fun to read.

Bob

The Journal of Applied Psychology, yeah, well I'm still writing plenty of other dull stuff!

Steve

Thank you very much. Jim —any …?

Jim

Nothing else, just wanted to remind everybody that we have been meeting with Bob Sutton, and I believe his blog, which you should definitely take a look at, is bobsutton.typepad.com/.

Speaker

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