AI transcript
0:00:16 I’m Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. We’re on a mission to make you remarkable.
0:00:23 Helping me in this episode is the remarkable Bob Sutton. Bob is an organizational psychologist
0:00:29 and best-selling author. He’s known for his work on leadership, innovation, and workplace
0:00:37 dynamics. He and I go back a long way, and we are both students in the science of assholes.
0:00:43 Not in the medical sense, more in the behavior sense. He’s even written a book on the subject
0:00:50 called “The No Asshole Rule.” Bob was a professor of management science and engineering at
0:00:58 Stanford from 1983 to 2023. He is currently a professor emeritus there. His current book,
0:01:03 “The Friction Project,” how smart leaders make the right things easier and the wrong
0:01:11 things harder, is a must read. Today, we are going to discuss good friction and bad friction
0:01:19 and assholes. I’m Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, and now here is the remarkable Bob
0:01:32 Sutton. We got to go backwards in time a little bit. We got to catch up. Explain how
0:01:41 many took the arse test, the asshole test. The asshole rating self-exam is a test that
0:01:46 actually it’s in my best-selling book, “The No Asshole Rule.” It was not called the asshole
0:01:52 rating self-exam. It’s also a test that my wife wrote. Not me. Usually, I write everything.
0:01:56 My wife doesn’t even read my stuff, but she was running a large law firm at this time.
0:02:05 Aren’t you a lawyer? Aren’t you ever a lawyer? I was a law student for two weeks. Most people
0:02:12 take 20 years to figure out they hate law. I did it in two weeks. That’s all smart.
0:02:16 She was running a law firm with about 1,000 lawyers, and I said my editor wants a test.
0:02:21 You got any ideas? She just thought of all the behaviors of all the lawyers who she was
0:02:26 dealing with. She wrote in about 10 minutes and was in the book, but you read the book
0:02:31 and you said, “Let’s call this the asshole rating self-exam.” The rest is history. I
0:02:39 looked it up. People can still find the arse test at Guy Kawasaki. 613,000 people had completed
0:02:47 it last time I looked, which was in 2023. Thanks, Guy. Beautiful PR. You were a genius.
0:02:51 I’m not sure that book would have been a bestseller without you. You were very helpful at just
0:02:54 the right time. Thank you for all the royalty you’ve been
0:03:01 sending me over the years. Yeah, you’re welcome. It helped me pay for the secret heart tuition.
0:03:06 I had to pay some secret heart tuition too. Ouch. I’m so glad my kids went to Cal State
0:03:15 schools. I started saving money when they graduated high school. Have you ever done any statistical
0:03:21 analysis and figured out what the mean and average score of the arse test was? It’s not
0:03:28 a scientific test. You mean the average is polling? Yeah, it’s probably worse than electric
0:03:33 polling, to be honest. But the mean is about eight, so that means that you’re occasionally
0:03:38 an asshole. But who knows what the mean uses? Because a lot of times, even though it’s a
0:03:45 self-exam, people will fill it out with their boss in mind. So I do that sometimes. There
0:03:50 was a point where, to tell tales out of school, I had a chair at Stanford who I thought was
0:03:55 a certified asshole, and I just completed the arse to see how he got like a 12 out of
0:04:01 24, which is pretty high actually, in my biased opinion. So it can be used for other purposes.
0:04:08 With your current view of the world, do you think assholeness is on the rise or decline?
0:04:14 So there’s two views of this, and one is that there’s just a certain percentage of us who
0:04:18 are assholes, no matter what. And that’s what we call those certified assholes, or I guess
0:04:23 I call those certified assholes. You know, I use the name Donald Trump, I think pretty
0:04:27 consistently across times and people, he treats people like shit. He really does. So I would
0:04:31 say he’s a certified asshole, and I wasn’t so sure about Elon Musk, but he seems to be
0:04:37 in the category too. But then there’s people who, psychologists are fantastic at turning
0:04:41 people into assholes. You just put them in a hurry, you have them be sleep deprived. Being
0:04:46 around assholes is one of the best ways to act like an asshole. I mean, perfectly normal
0:04:50 people, they work with a bunch of assholes. It’s like they pick up the vibe. It’s contagious.
0:04:56 But my rough sense is that because of the internet, and because of the hurry sickness
0:05:04 that we have, and also another thing that does turn people nasty, is when there’s inequality.
0:05:10 And especially when inequality is obvious. I’ll give you an interesting example. One
0:05:14 of my colleagues, Katie Dacelles, who I do research with, she’s a psychologist, she studied
0:05:19 air rage, and she found out sometimes when you get in the plane, if you turn left, you
0:05:23 go to first class. And if you turn right, you go to coach. But other times you have to walk
0:05:28 through first class. If you found out in the planes where you have to walk through first
0:05:34 class, there’s more likely to be air rage by both people in first class and in coach,
0:05:41 because the inequality is made more obvious. She had a huge data set. So anything associated
0:05:44 with inequality, it actually brings out the worst in both the powerful and the powerless,
0:05:50 because the powerless kick down and the powerless kick up. So you end up with revolution in
0:05:56 domination. So my hunch is things might be getting a little bit worse, but for time in
0:06:00 memoriam, there’s always been a certain percentage of us who are certified assholes. And all
0:06:03 of us can be temporary assholes under the wrong conditions.
0:06:11 Do you think that being a certified mission driven asshole is okay? I’m referring specifically
0:06:17 to Steve Jobs. So let’s talk, you worked for Steve Jobs and I did not, especially in my
0:06:21 second asshole book, who knows, I should have written it, the asshole survival guy. I actually
0:06:25 did a lot of investigation about whether Steve was an asshole. And here’s at least what
0:06:30 I came up with. And my main source, this is in the book, was Ed Katmull. So Ed was head
0:06:38 of Pixar for 28 years, met with Steve every week for 27, 28 years. And here’s Ed’s perspective.
0:06:43 So I don’t know, believe it or not. But Ed’s perspective is that the Steve Jobs, who you
0:06:48 might have worked with, you worked with him before he was kicked out of the kingdom, right?
0:06:49 Before and after.
0:06:55 Oh, and after. So Ed’s point, and you may disagree, is that that Steve after he got kicked out
0:07:01 of the kingdom and had all the trouble at next, he actually became and went through the darkness
0:07:05 or the wilderness as Ed put it, he became actually a better person and a more humble
0:07:12 person. And in particular, coach Bill Campbell, who went for a walk with him every Sunday,
0:07:18 helped him, if you will, stifle his demons a little bit. So I know that’s accurate.
0:07:23 And there’s also another take on this, which is this one says I’ve spent way too much time
0:07:27 thinking about getting Silicon Valley gossip and stuff, is that there’s also the other
0:07:32 problem with the story. And Ed agreed with this is at Apple, he was more of an asshole
0:07:37 than Pixar because Pixar had a less ass holy culture. And it was just an investment for
0:07:42 him. It wasn’t like his life, like Apple was like his life. And he knew he was the smartest
0:07:47 person at Apple. He didn’t know he was the smartest person at Pixar and he had Ed Katmell
0:07:52 and people like that. Brad Bird, the great director. So there’s different takes on this.
0:07:57 And the other thing about Steve, which you probably know, is Steve would do amazingly
0:08:01 support of things for people that were just almost irrational. He could be very loving
0:08:06 and giving backstage. He didn’t donate any money to anybody. Lorraine Jobs is doing that
0:08:11 now. So there’s two takes that maybe he was an asshole who succeeded. And then the other
0:08:16 part is the Ed Katmell story that it was the Steve Jobs, who became at least less of an
0:08:21 asshole who got really, really rich. So I don’t know which is true, but those are different
0:08:27 stories that I tend to hear. Let’s face it, there are people who are assholes who do succeed.
0:08:32 We know this. Maybe Elon Musk will get fired from Tesla and come back a better person.
0:08:39 Elon Musk is not a good person. Maybe he was a, oh, gosh, a better person, a less bad
0:08:49 person. All right, so we covered the background here now. I love a good acronym. And I spent
0:08:55 a long time coming up with ours. Right. Although we chat GPT, we could come up with that in
0:09:01 five seconds. So I’m reading your book and I see gross, get rid of stupid shit. And
0:09:09 I saw that I said, Oh my God, that’s better than ours. And I think ours is pretty good.
0:09:16 Anyway, see, you want me to talk about it or you just want to talk about gross. So where
0:09:22 gross comes from is that all of us, at least in the United States, and I understand every
0:09:26 country in the world now has electronic medical records. And we know we go to the doctor,
0:09:31 the nurse practitioner or whatever, they spend the whole time filling out the form and looking
0:09:36 at the screen and never looking at us. And this is a worldwide problem. It’s actually
0:09:41 one of the main sources of stress for physicians and nurses to this drives them crazy. So there’s
0:09:44 a woman named Hawaii, you know something about Hawaii, aren’t you spending some time in Hawaii
0:09:50 these days? Yeah, absolutely. We just got back from Kauai just two days ago, beautiful
0:09:54 place. What a gorgeous. I hope you flew in first class and pissed off all the coach people
0:10:01 first class on the way there coach on the way back. The flight attendants were awesome,
0:10:05 by the way, I got to say to complain about United, but the flight attendants were awesome.
0:10:10 Yeah, but was it a plane that should have been passed through quality control? It was
0:10:19 a Boeing plane. Actually a 737 max. Oh, my God. So this woman, there’s a woman in
0:10:25 Hawaii Pacific, which is the largest healthcare system in Hawaii, her name’s Melinda Ashton.
0:10:30 And she was upset because they had these electronic medical records and all this stuff that people
0:10:34 had to spend all their time sort of staring at the screen. So she had this campaign and
0:10:38 she censored it. She said, getting rid of stupid stuff, even though it was really getting
0:10:44 rid of stupid shit. And she said, give suggestions to our team. Maybe we can figure out how to
0:10:51 simplify the systems. They got 188 suggestions, they implemented 87 and just one little example
0:10:56 and I think I wrote it. Here it is. So her team eliminated one click that was necessary
0:11:01 for patient rounds and at least according to their calculations, the approximately 1700
0:11:06 hours per month were saved at the four hospitals as a result. And our book is about friction
0:11:11 fixing and the challenge is a friction. And I love that example because our perspective
0:11:17 is no matter where you are in an organization, you can make things better or worse. And she
0:11:21 had the power to set up the getting rid of stupid stuff campaign, which by the way, this
0:11:26 was published in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title of gross a very respectable
0:11:32 academic journal. And she used her power to set up the gross system, getting rid of stupid
0:11:38 stuff system. And then people throughout the hospital, nurses, aides, nurses, doctors were
0:11:42 empowered to make suggestions, many of which were implemented. So to me, and this is a
0:11:46 lesson from this book, we started writing this book just because we were pissed off about
0:11:50 how hard it was to get things done. And all these organizations like Google, Google used
0:11:56 to be so easy to get things done. Now, honestly, Google, it’s so much harder to get things done
0:12:00 there than General Motors. They have a cash machine and General Motors has to make one
0:12:03 car at a time, which they usually lose money on. So it’s much harder to get things done
0:12:07 at Google than it is a General Motors right now. It’s just turned into this giant hair
0:12:12 ball of fiefdoms and bureaucracy. It’s just a mess. It’s nice having a hose that shoots
0:12:19 in the money. It is. I gave a talk at Google and I was paid, I don’t know, a few thousand
0:12:24 bucks and I’ve spent weeks trying to get the money. I had to become a vendor, then I had
0:12:29 to join SAP, then I had to join all this and that. I still haven’t been paid. And you’re
0:12:33 still filling out the forms. So that’s the same experience. Honestly, as we’re talking
0:12:37 about Google and speech, the other thing that I know about them is there’s actually four
0:12:42 or five groups that are fighting over who owns the speaking. And so there’s four or
0:12:47 five warring fiefdoms because, oh, so this is one of the other things that I like to
0:12:51 look out for in Silicon Valley companies. Oh, and my university, Stanford, also suffers
0:12:57 from this, by the way, which is spending money is a substitute for thinking. So where this
0:13:01 happens, we got so much money and you say, we’re going to buy some new software. We’re
0:13:06 going to start a new position. We’re going to start a new group. And pretty soon, your
0:13:11 organization is filled with groups and software that nobody knows how to use or weave together.
0:13:17 So yes, that sometimes money can be used to reduce friction. But sometimes the more money
0:13:20 you have, just the worse it gets, because you can buy more stuff and more people and
0:13:36 more buildings. And it’s like more money, more problems. So you know, I think bad friction
0:13:42 is kind of obvious. You already mentioned a great example, but what is good friction?
0:13:47 Ooh, to your point, when we started the book, it was like, and it’s hard to do the frictionless
0:13:53 organization. We want everything to be like really easy. But then along the way, we figured
0:13:57 out that something should be hard. Well, let’s start out with one of our many famous Stanford
0:14:04 dropouts, Elizabeth Holmes. So she didn’t like the fact that the device, the fraudulent
0:14:09 device that she developed to put it on US Army helicopters that she needed FDA approval.
0:14:13 She was really pissed off. In fact, she got General Mad Dog Mattis to put pressure on
0:14:18 the military to have her put it on anyways. And the bureaucrats fought back. And even
0:14:23 Mattis eventually had to agree that it should have FDA approval. So I think the fact that
0:14:29 it was impossible for her to put that in the helicopters is good. And to give you a contrary
0:14:35 example, so I’ve got two students they’re talked about in the book, amazing students,
0:14:40 Amanda Calabrese and Greta Meyer, they started a company called Sequel. They’re reinventing
0:14:45 the modern tampon. They spent their whole undergraduate career taking entrepreneurship
0:14:49 classes and figuring out the science of reinventing this tampon because their athletes, it was
0:14:55 leaking and everything. So they have reinvented the tampon. They claim after 80 years that
0:15:00 they finally reinvented the product. And they got FDA approval. They got $5 million in venture
0:15:05 capital and in the name of full disclosure, I have invested $25,000 in the company. And
0:15:09 I think it might be the first venture I’ve ever invested in, to be honest. I’m not like
0:15:14 a venture capitalist. Like, like you were at least, but they have gone the hard way.
0:15:20 So that’s an example. Some of the other things that should be slow bowing bowing. Talk about
0:15:25 bowing bowing. This is the classic case that to do things right, sometimes you have to
0:15:30 slow down, you know, slow down and fix things. Sometimes that actually has to work. Yes,
0:15:35 that’s really important. That when things are complicated, that rushing through and cutting
0:15:41 corners can kill people in the case of bowing. Fortunately, not us yet. One other thing,
0:15:44 which I think is important. I’ve been reading, if you’ve seen this book, remarkable people
0:15:49 who’ve seen this book, my copy came with socks. Most people don’t come with socks and a headphone.
0:15:53 I should be wearing the socks. Really cool socks. And my wife looked at me, she said,
0:15:57 Oh, those are high quality socks. So you’re not cheaping out. So anyway, so you know a
0:16:01 lot about creativity. And have you ever interviewed Teresa Mabley from Harvard Business School?
0:16:06 Just like somebody you might’ve tripped over. No, I don’t know who she is. Teresa’s been
0:16:12 studying creativity for 50 years. Mays started as a Stanford PhD and she’s just been studying
0:16:17 all aspects of creativity. And essentially, if you look at her work and other research,
0:16:22 you can’t hurry love, you can’t hurry creativity either. There’s a point where if you try to
0:16:27 rush it, the problem is there’s a really high failure rate. There tends to be constructive
0:16:34 disagreement. It’s a messy, complicated process with a low success rate. And one of my favorite
0:16:39 stories that’s in the book was when Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed by the Harvard Business
0:16:44 Review. And they said, could McKinsey have made your process for Seinfeld more efficient?
0:16:48 And he asked who McKinsey was, and they told him he was a consulting firm. And then he
0:16:53 said, are they funny? And they said, no, believe me, we know McKinsey, they are not funny.
0:16:57 They may be other things. They are not funny. And then he said, the hard way is the right
0:17:02 way. It’s not something you make more efficient. And just the same is the venture capital world,
0:17:07 the way that Jerry Seinfeld does a routine is he goes to venues that are very small and
0:17:12 tries a few hundred jokes and keeps 15 or 20 of them for a set or something like that.
0:17:17 So creativity is inefficient. Another thing that isn’t efficient, and I just said you
0:17:23 can’t hurry love. There’s all this evidence that the most effective teams, everything
0:17:29 from startup teams to surgical teams, to people actually who fly airplanes to that the more
0:17:34 they’ve worked together, the more effective they are like Charlie Munger and, and more
0:17:39 in Buffett. So you got that. And then the last and I just thinking of you at this stage
0:17:44 of your life and that surfing, which I just, I admire you with the surfing so much. It’s
0:17:48 just amazing how late in life you started, how into it you are Bob, just in the street
0:17:56 of transparency, I rescheduled this interview because I wanted to surf. I said that to my
0:18:05 wife. I bet he’s surfing. Hooray for you. All right. Where’d you go surfing Santa Cruz?
0:18:10 Oh, good for you. All right. Bless your heart. You’re pretty sunburned too. So this stuff
0:18:14 tails perfectly with you. You’re surfing this morning. I hope you that the waves are good.
0:18:18 You had a nice ride actually. There’s this amazing research, which we just started getting
0:18:23 into at the book. It’s on savoring. And so there’s all this research about coping and
0:18:28 there’s all this bad stuff in life we got to deal with. But this guy’s name is Fred Bryant.
0:18:33 He’s from the University of Michigan originally. And he’s been savoring this notion that have
0:18:40 good mental health. What you do is you anticipate something great. You enjoy it while it’s happening.
0:18:46 You reflect on how wonderful it is. It’s not just rushing through and checking the boxes.
0:18:51 And so to me, this idea of strategic slowness, and yes, there’s some things you got to do
0:18:55 really fast. If the blood’s squirting out of me, I want the surgeon to sew me up really
0:18:59 fast. I don’t want him or her to slow down and enjoy the moment. I want to get that
0:19:04 shit done. But that idea of savoring is another thing just from a leadership perspective to
0:19:11 slow down and to enjoy people and celebrate. And one of our mutual friends, David Kelly
0:19:17 of IDEO fame, back in the 90s, I hung out at IDEO a lot. And that’s one thing David
0:19:22 was always so good about, which was like when they completed a project or they had something
0:19:26 to celebrate. And that was a very intensive place in terms of how people work. In those
0:19:31 days, he would rent an ice cream truck to come to IDEO and give away everybody a free
0:19:36 ice cream in the company, just to get people to relax and enjoy life. And so that’s another
0:19:41 time and maybe because we’re both 70 at this point in my life, that a savoring sounds like
0:19:42 a pretty good deal.
0:19:48 Actually, you also brought in your book, the Ikea effect, right? Which is savoring too.
0:19:51 Savoring is strategic. That’s making other people suffer. So this is the notion that
0:19:57 labor leads to love. The Ikea effect is the harder you work at something independently
0:20:01 of its value, the more you’re going to think it’s important to justify all that effort
0:20:05 you put into it. And my favorite thing about the Ikea effect studies, and we all know you
0:20:10 go to Ikea, it’s impossible to get through the place even. But the Ikea effect where
0:20:14 they do the experiments was they show people a box and say, how much would you pay for
0:20:18 this box? And people, it would sound like a buck 50 or something. And then they’d have
0:20:21 them assemble the box and then they’d say, how much would you pay for the box? It’d be
0:20:27 like three bucks because I put all this work into my stinking box. So that’s the Ikea effect
0:20:32 is a notion that labor leads to love, which every fraternity, sorority and military in
0:20:37 the world knows that the Navy seals that the suffering, this must be worth it. I’m suffering.
0:20:43 We actually had Mike Norton on this week’s episode of the podcast. We’re familiar with
0:20:49 the concept. So okay, but now listen, as I was reading your book, it was like very clear
0:20:53 to me, okay, so there’s bad friction. You got to take that out. I understand the good
0:20:59 friction which leads to savoring and higher quality and all that kind of stuff. I give
0:21:05 you a theoretical example because I struggle with the contextual judgment of friction.
0:21:11 So let me give you an example. So some of my friends, they have put astroturf on their
0:21:16 lawns. They don’t have grass anymore. They put astroturf. So you could say that astroturf
0:21:21 has reduced friction. There’s no more watering, no more mowing, no more all that. But you
0:21:27 could also say that a lawn, a regular lawn increases good friction because you’re outdoors,
0:21:32 you’re exercising, you’re interacting with your neighbors, but then you’ve got to use
0:21:39 a gas lawnmower to create pollution. So what is astroturf? Good friction or bad friction?
0:21:44 Honestly, this is a complete value judgment. I would say that some things that are low
0:21:49 friction are just bad tastes. And if your friends have bad tastes in low friction, that’s
0:21:56 just fine. You know what it reminds me a little bit of? There was this doctor I knew who every
0:22:01 morning what he would do when he had coffee, he would take really cheap instant coffee,
0:22:04 he would dump the water and he’d stick in the microwave oven and he’d stir it and he’d
0:22:10 drink it and then run out the door. And that’s astroturf. That’s very low friction. But go
0:22:15 back, I don’t see any savoring in there. I savour my cup of coffee. In my perspective
0:22:20 in that it’s like, why doesn’t he just take caffeine? Like you don’t even need to drink
0:22:25 coffee at all. If your goal is just to get the caffeine, probably better for your stomach.
0:22:31 So anyways, I would just stick with what is low friction, bad taste.
0:22:38 Could you make the case that the postal servers, pony express, telephone, telegraph, email,
0:22:41 text messaging, zoom, all remove too much friction?
0:22:45 Why do you say that?
0:22:49 Because all of those things meant no more face-to-face interaction.
0:22:56 We’re talking about a situation where there’s, or even, and now the same thing is instant
0:23:01 checkout. So in the process of the frictionless organization, we’re also removing the possibility
0:23:06 for human interaction. So in fact, in the book we talk about, and this is back to savoring,
0:23:10 there’s a chain of grocery stores. The largest grocery store chain in the Netherlands are
0:23:16 called Jumbo. And what they did is, for senior citizens like us, who might be lonely, they
0:23:17 came up with the slow…
0:23:19 I’m a senior citizen. I’m not lonely.
0:23:23 Me neither. In fact, I wish I was a little more lonely sometimes.
0:23:24 Less friction.
0:23:31 I spent four days with my adult kids. No, eight days. So anyways, for those who are lonely,
0:23:35 they have these chit chat lanes or slow checkout lanes. And we just fact check this. They start
0:23:40 this in one store, and they’ve scaled it to 225 of their stores. And the idea is you’re
0:23:45 getting in knowing it’s sort of like a slow experience. So there are some things that
0:23:50 should be higher friction for more sort of social interaction. And certainly that makes
0:23:53 sense. And we know that it’s like when you go to a three-star Michelin restaurant, you
0:23:56 don’t want to get in and out in 15 minutes. That’s not what the goal is.
0:23:57 Wow.
0:24:03 That is an interesting concept, man. I got to tell you though, Bob, I love whole foods
0:24:08 because I can just hold my right palm over the sensor. And I don’t have to get out my
0:24:12 wallet. I don’t even have to get out my iPhone. I told my kids, if I’m about to die, cut off
0:24:16 my hand. You can get free groceries the rest of your life.
0:24:23 So that’s actually a good example, even though it’s morbid about cutting off your hands,
0:24:27 that what good organizational design, and that’s why we have the subtitle, that the
0:24:32 right things are easy and the wrong things are harder or slower. But the other thing
0:24:39 is I also think we’re oversimplifying this in two ways. One is, and this is one of my
0:24:47 favorite examples, is that what good leaders do, is they figure out how to, or designers,
0:24:52 how to use good friction to get rid of bad friction. So one of my favorite examples,
0:24:56 and so we’ve been bashing Google, so I’ll say something good about Google. You may know
0:25:02 Lazlo Bach, maybe Lazlo on your show, show his book, Work Rules, great guy, he was basically
0:25:08 head of HR, people operations, whatever they call it, Google for eight years. So gets there,
0:25:11 and Larry and Sergey did a pretty good job building the company and building the culture
0:25:16 in the early days, but there’s always that problem that stuff that worked in the beginning
0:25:21 gets to be a problem. And one of the things they did in building the culture was, and
0:25:27 I remember actually, I have a tape recording from 2002 where I interviewed Larry Page where
0:25:32 he was said, we’re interviewing people 10, 15, 20 times, because we want to build the
0:25:37 right culture. And maybe that made sense in the early days. But so Lazlo gets there some
0:25:44 years later, and the tradition continues. And he said, we’ve got people interviewing,
0:25:49 and I remember doing the fact checking with him 10, 12, 15 times, he said 25 times. Sometimes
0:25:53 you get interviewed for a job 25 times, and you don’t get the offer. This is a good way
0:25:58 to waste a lot of effort. So anyway, so he came up with a simple rule, which is if you’re
0:26:04 going to do more than four job interviews, you just have to write me for written permission.
0:26:10 That was the whole simple rule. And he said, magically, the excessive interviews disappeared
0:26:14 almost immediately. And so to go back to the lesson, what good designers are always trying
0:26:21 to do is, is to make it hard for people to add stuff that slows the whole system down.
0:26:27 And the one that I’m doing some research on now with my friends at Asana is we even had
0:26:31 this on this call, which is that I saw two apps and I went to the wrong app and you had
0:26:36 to send me the email for the right app. And what happens in many organizations, including
0:26:42 my employer, Stanford, if you have a credit card at Stanford, you can buy software for
0:26:48 your use or your team’s use that therefore you impose on everybody who deals with you.
0:26:52 And so what you end up having in organizations is they call this the credit card problem
0:26:56 is just zillions of different kind of software and the causes switching and confusion and
0:27:00 learning problems. And so what’s happening in some of the companies we’re working with
0:27:07 is the CTOs are putting in more obstacles when you try to buy or renew software. So
0:27:12 that to me can be good friction. So so that’s one thing that I like to think about. The other
0:27:17 thing, which I think is also important is friction can be weaponized. So it’s good for
0:27:23 you and bad for other people. In the most extreme case here, of course, what they call Roche
0:27:29 motels, which is the example we’ve all had, you subscribe to something. I had this with
0:27:35 the Financial Times, for example. And it’s absolutely impossible to get out of it where
0:27:39 they ask you, are you sure you want to get out? This is a mistake, Mr. Sutton. And I
0:27:44 remember the Financial Times, I had to go through 15 different questions. And finally,
0:27:48 no, no, no, I want to get up. No, no, no, I want to get out of which this, by the way,
0:27:52 is unlawful in the state of California, but not other states now. But that’s another kind
0:27:57 of way in which friction is uses weaponized to make it impossible for us to get rid of
0:28:04 software and gym memberships things. When I read that example, it brought to mind something
0:28:10 that I just happened to me last week. I quit MailChimp. I deleted my MailChimp account.
0:28:15 And it was in five seconds. It was so fast. I thought something is wrong here. I could
0:28:21 not have quit. And then I quit so fast. I went on LinkedIn and I went on threads and
0:28:26 I said, kudos to MailChimp. They let me quit so easily. If only the rest of their company
0:28:33 worked that well. But that’s actually interesting because when
0:28:38 we were working on the book, we talked to some of the folks at Netflix who were involved
0:28:43 in the decision long before it was the law to make it really easy to quit. And including
0:28:49 Patty McCord, who was head of H that are there for years for 14 years. And she said two things.
0:28:53 She said, first of all, in the early days, when it was hard to quit, we were just embarrassed.
0:28:56 Our friends would say, I tried to quit Netflix. It would be terrible. And the other thing
0:29:01 she said, and this is the MailChimp thing, is she said, we actually figured out from
0:29:06 a long term strategic standpoint that if it was easy to quit, we’d have really good data
0:29:10 about dissatisfaction because that’s much better than giving people a survey. If they’re
0:29:15 quitting easily, you get much more sensitive data about dissatisfaction. So one of the
0:29:19 reasons she argued that Netflix has done so well in the long term is they’ve always had
0:29:24 great data about customer dissatisfaction because it’s so easy to quit. And also it’s
0:29:28 not a subscription. You can quit anytime. Wow. I never thought of that. It makes intuitive
0:29:32 sense. If you’re so happy, it was easy to quit. You’re willing to invest some time
0:29:36 giving the company feedback. That makes perfect sense.
0:29:41 Also the other thing Patty said about making it easy to quit is to come back, that you’re
0:29:43 not going to get in a Roche Motel. Yeah.
0:29:47 That you can quit again. The example is not to call out one of my daughters, but I got
0:29:51 a daughter. I think you might have met Eve, went to school with your son. So Eve, with
0:29:56 all due respect, she’s like the Emelda Marcos of the family. She loves her shoes. She has
0:30:00 so many shoes. In fact, she just went to Europe with her boyfriend and she sent me
0:30:04 a picture of how proud she was of how she packed her five pairs of shoes in the suitcase
0:30:11 for a carry-on. Literally. She’s a shoe girl. So anyway, I see only five pairs. Oh, six.
0:30:18 She was wearing one, remember? So anyway, for her, that’s nothing. So anyway, I see
0:30:23 how many shoes she returns to Amazon. It’s just amazing. I honestly think that she only
0:30:27 keeps one out of four pairs of shoes because unfortunately I see it because I think when
0:30:34 I’m 90 and my kids are 50, they’re still going to be in the family Amazon. Up next on Remarkable
0:30:40 People. One definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience that the little people
0:30:45 have to deal with. So what they’ll do as senior executives, and I guess whiny professors like
0:30:51 me, is that they create a completely friction free experience that the little people are
0:30:55 not protected from.
0:31:00 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show
0:31:06 for you. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review
0:31:13 it. Even better, forward it to a friend, a big mahalo to you for doing this.
0:31:18 Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:31:23 I loved your example. We’re going all over the map in this interview, but I loved your
0:31:29 example about how much TSA Pre has helped people. That is so true.
0:31:35 Yeah, let’s talk about that because TSA Pre is an example of something that has made all
0:31:41 of our lives easier. But the other thing, and yes, we can all bash government for not
0:31:45 being efficient enough. And yes, oh God, we know how terrible the bureaucracy is and how
0:31:49 hard things can be to get done, and I can tell my stories and I’m sure you can. But there
0:31:52 are bright spots in government.
0:31:53 Yes.
0:31:57 And I think it’s important to give people credit. In the book, we talk about this amazing group
0:32:02 in Michigan. There was a benefits form that 2.5 million Michiganders filled out a year
0:32:07 to get healthcare, to get food stamps, things like that. Longest benefits form in the United
0:32:13 States, 1,000 questions. One question was, when was your child conceived? This was like
0:32:20 just crazy form. And a guy named Michael Brennan did the work to work with the bureaucrats,
0:32:25 to work with the frontline employees over two years. And the lawyers, because you do
0:32:29 a new form, you’ve got to have a lot of lawyers, you’ve got a lot to comply to. Now there’s
0:32:35 a form that’s 80% shorter that’s filled out by 2.5 million Michiganders. So there is hope.
0:32:39 And now people don’t seem to believe us, but the California DMV is actually getting a little
0:32:40 bit better.
0:32:43 Oh, I think it’s much better.
0:32:44 I’m glad to hear that.
0:32:52 I absolutely agree. I spoke to the CIOs of all of California and the DMV was there.
0:32:57 And I said, the fact that you can go on the California DMV website and get your number
0:33:02 before you leave for the office is amazing.
0:33:05 Because I don’t want to overstate it, because we do talk about an example in the book of
0:33:11 a guy who came out and made my visit to the DMV much more pleasant and faster than I ever
0:33:13 expected by basically doing triage.
0:33:17 But now, Huggy and I are doing a case study with Steve Gordon, a guy from Cisco, who’s
0:33:23 head of the DMV. He’s visited all 180 field offices of the DMV. And he’s asked how to
0:33:29 improve stuff. He’s done all this digitization stuff. So, yes, there are still challenges
0:33:33 of just having visited the DMV again last week to get my real ID. It’s not perfect.
0:33:38 There are still some unhappy people, but you get through there faster. The employees are
0:33:39 more friendly and supportive.
0:33:40 Yeah, they agree.
0:33:45 It’s not perfect, but it’s an example that government can be made better, even the DMV.
0:33:48 And so that’s what I’ve been saying to my friends.
0:33:50 Oh, we agree on that. We agree on that.
0:33:51 Good.
0:33:53 So, let’s say people are listening to this and they’re saying, okay, enough with the
0:34:00 stories, boys. Just tell me, how do I add good friction and how do I remove bad friction?
0:34:01 What’s the tactics?
0:34:07 The book has a bazillion interventions points, but the main points we have are, we call it
0:34:13 oblivious leaders. If you’re a leader, try to be aware of what we call your cone of friction.
0:34:18 How your behavior influences people around you. Are you writing overly long emails? Are
0:34:23 you keeping them too long in meetings? Are you calling too many meetings? A great example,
0:34:28 a well-known software firm that I know. I won’t name it, but some people may guess.
0:34:33 There was 400 vice presidents. They were complaining there were too many Slack messages. The Slack
0:34:38 messages were too long and they were irrelevant. And the head of learning development, she
0:34:42 interrupts me and she says, so who’s sending those Slack messages? Could each one of you
0:34:44 please look in the mirror?
0:34:50 And so that to me is an example of the sort of oblivious executive, so it’s your executive
0:34:56 behavior. The next one we talk about is the notion of trying to stem what we call addition
0:35:01 sickness. There’s all sorts of evidence that as human beings, our natural way of solving
0:35:08 problems is to add and add and add and add. More people, more software, more initiatives.
0:35:13 But what good organizations do is they have some discipline about subtraction. A quick
0:35:20 thing we’ve done, and we use the example already of the getting rid of stupid stuff exercise
0:35:24 in Hawaii, is that we’ve played something we call the subtraction game with more than
0:35:28 200 organizations. That’s what we were doing with the unnamed large software company is
0:35:34 we said, what should you get rid of? And we sometimes it’s just like BS, but other times
0:35:39 they actually make progress. And just one little example, I was working with a pharmaceutical
0:35:45 company in the general counsel head lawyer, he said, I’m counting this in the middle of
0:35:50 playing the subtraction game, what should get rid of? We have 80 family leave policies
0:35:53 because they’re in different countries and everything. And he wrote me back two weeks
0:35:57 later that he’d gotten it down to 60. Now that’s not completely trimming, but that’s
0:36:02 an example. And then two more one is broken connections, look at the handoffs in your
0:36:07 organization and fix them in healthcare. That’s a huge issue. And then finally, my favorite
0:36:13 jargon monoxide, which are essentially the incomprehensible language that people use
0:36:19 in your organization that nobody can understand. And to put in a word for chat GPT in this
0:36:27 crazy times, if you instruct chat GPT to make things simpler and to bring down the reading
0:36:31 level, you can actually simplify the language in your organization. So I’m just doing a
0:36:36 rant, but to reduce destructive friction, what’s your behavior as a leader? What can
0:36:41 you subtract handoffs in that file jargon monoxide? You clean up your language basically.
0:36:47 This is an example of this vice provost of Stanford sending out an email with 1300 words
0:36:54 and 7300 word attachment attachment. And so I know what I think, but don’t you think
0:37:00 if he or she had stuck that email in chat GPT and says simplify this, make it high school
0:37:06 reading level, it would have been 10 times better. Yes. And just to be clear, so this
0:37:11 was an email that was sent out to all 2000 tenure track faculty, inviting us to spend
0:37:17 a Saturday, a full Saturday brainstorming on zoom about the new door sustainability
0:37:21 school. So it was just like, please give us your time in your city at home during the
0:37:27 pandemic. And I did immediately forward the email to her boss and suggest that this this
0:37:32 was not good management. But yes, if that person had put in chat GPT, it would have
0:37:37 been much shorter. And there are some great uses of chat GPT. In addition to the fact
0:37:42 that it’s fun to poke one of my bosses that there was a surgical consent form that was
0:37:47 used by the largest healthcare provider in the state of Rhode Island. I can’t remember
0:37:51 the name right now. And what they did was they took their form, which was at the 12th
0:37:55 grade reading level, and it was three pages long. And they said made it make it simpler
0:38:00 and for in shorter. And what they got back was something that was about a page long and
0:38:04 was at the sixth grade reading level. And now they’re using more or less what they got
0:38:10 back for 35,000 people a year, chat GPT and all these large language models. The problem
0:38:14 is they’re more efficient for adding friction, because you can just use it to write zillions
0:38:19 of emails and and to change things. So you got to be careful that it can be weaponized
0:38:24 against people. But if we’re disciplined and view it as an as an editing tool, rather than
0:38:27 an addition tool, it could help us.
0:38:32 Maybe there’s a product idea there that slack could offer this feature where every message
0:38:37 you send in slack will first go through our AI and we’ll simplify it for you. And then
0:38:41 I’ll come out the other and it’ll be shorter and better.
0:38:47 So I would not be surprised if that already exists. There’s a woman named Clarish I who
0:38:53 is one of my students, former students and is head of AI at Salesforce. And I think she
0:38:57 would say that something like that may have been developed already. I’m not sure, but
0:39:05 I think it may actually exist. Okay. So now let’s talk about friction again. And how hard
0:39:12 or easy should it be for a party to change their presidential candidate?
0:39:18 Well, I don’t mean to be political, but I will be political. Yes, I think that it should
0:39:21 be easy. And it’s interesting that to tell you a story out of school, a good friend of
0:39:25 mine is Adam Grant. I knew him before he was so famous. It was ridiculous. And he’s always
0:39:31 been a man. So the number of messages we exchange being concerned about Joe Biden’s behavior
0:39:36 is unbelievable. But Adam being Adam that three days later, he had a piece in New York Times
0:39:41 describing this as an example of escalating commitment to a failing course of action.
0:39:46 As publicly you commit to something the harder it is to get rid of. And especially when you’re
0:39:49 surrounded with people have an incentive for you to keep going even though they know it’s
0:39:54 not for the greater good, something has to be done about it. So yes, it should be easier.
0:40:03 Okay, so now what companies are in the Sutton Hall of Friction fame for removing friction
0:40:09 in an outstanding way? Well, so the idea that there’s companies that are consistently great
0:40:14 at it, I think they go through periods where they’re good and where they’re bad. I do think
0:40:20 just to name a couple and they have other problems. Amazon’s actually from the beginning
0:40:25 been quite good. And I think Jeff Bezos is very, very disciplined about being frugal,
0:40:30 but also being customer focused. And 2014, I gave a speech up there, which of course
0:40:35 was unpaid, which was part of the frugality. And I remember just asking them, so what’s
0:40:40 sacred and what’s taboo taboo here? And almost in unison, they said what’s sacred is the
0:40:45 customer and what’s taboo is wasting money. And they’re very good about using people’s
0:40:50 times during meetings. And it’s not just frugality, it’s they’re a disciplined company. So I think
0:40:55 that Amazon actually would be pretty good. The other one, which is more controversial
0:41:00 and maybe almost too much. And I am going there to give a talk in a couple of weeks
0:41:05 is Walmart, which is the largest private employer in the United States. They really have a lot
0:41:11 of discipline about, for example, organizational simplicity. Walmart only has eight, eight
0:41:16 levels of hierarchy from the store manager to the CEO. And if I compare that, let’s say
0:41:20 to what is it Metaslash Facebook, which has, I think they’re trying to reduce them now.
0:41:26 They have something like 12 a while ago. And so those are some that come to mind. And then
0:41:34 I even hate to bring up Jensen, Wong and Nvidia, but man, talk about a disciplined place and
0:41:39 the nature of their discipline. And it’s good to compare them to Amazon and to Walmart
0:41:44 because Walmart and Amazon are command and control places. They really are. It’s top
0:41:49 down. You will do what you are told kind of places. But the difference for Nvidia is that
0:41:54 the way that they do it is by cultural control. I think he’s got 50 direct reports, which
0:41:58 according to some of my other work, it should be impossible for a CEO to have 50 direct
0:42:04 reports and do their job. But if you trust them completely and you don’t micromanage
0:42:09 them completely, and maybe it’s possible. So maybe my theory about organizational design
0:42:14 is wrong. So I was talking to a woman just two weeks ago who’s working at Nvidia. She
0:42:18 was like an accountant. She’s been working there for about 15 years. And all this stuff
0:42:23 about remote work, how many days a week do we have? We know this. There’s just a huge
0:42:28 amount of research and argument. And Jamie Dimmond is saying they got to be back in the
0:42:33 office, blah, blah, blah. And so I said, so what’s Jensen’s take on this? Oh, Jensen trusts
0:42:37 us and he says that we each should do what’s best for us, even though we have really, really
0:42:42 nice offices to go to. What a concept. Trusting people. You get rid of a lot of friction.
0:42:47 If you don’t spend all that time watching them really, really closely and monitoring
0:42:51 them really, really closely and always being worried about the lawsuit, and then do something
0:42:55 wrong. And then in organizations like that, we have a strong culture. When somebody does
0:42:59 something wrong, it doesn’t have to be top down. Their colleagues will slam them because
0:43:04 they’re ruining it for all of us. And we know that’s that’s what a good culture.
0:43:11 So now who’s in the Sutton Hall of Friction, shame, shame? I hate to say it, but I know
0:43:17 too much about it. I believe my employer, Stanford, God love them. I think that we have
0:43:21 got serious problems that we make things much harder than they need to be for faculty, staff
0:43:28 and students. And in my aforementioned argument before is that sometimes organizations, they
0:43:32 can’t get rid of the friction, but other times they have enough money that they spend money
0:43:36 as a substitute for thinking. I think we do some of that. And then the one that I really
0:43:43 would call out and I talk about in the book is Comcast. Comcast, try their phone tree.
0:43:49 You want bad AI. They make it virtually impossible for you to get through to a human. And I’m
0:43:53 not alone in bashing Comcast. And I talk about this in the book. One thing they do that makes
0:43:59 it even worse. So when I had trouble getting through to Comcast, my mother had passed away
0:44:05 and was dealing with a bunch of complicated issues for a house. I actually wrote on Twitter
0:44:11 complaining about Comcast. And I know a board member. I won’t name him, but I met him three
0:44:16 or four times. So he writes me like a personal message and says, I’ll get you to someone.
0:44:24 So three days later, I’m on like the VIP line. So I call one ring and somebody in Arizona
0:44:28 and everything was fixed immediately. And then they did something else for my son in
0:44:32 San Francisco. And they went in person. And they didn’t charge us. It was the nicest person
0:44:39 you ever met. And so the problem that Comcast has, which some organizations have, some airlines
0:44:44 and sometimes General Motors too, is one of the reasons the system is so screwed up is
0:44:50 that one definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience that the little people have
0:44:55 to deal with. So what they’ll do as senior executives, and I guess whiny professors like
0:45:01 me is that they create a completely friction free experience that the little people are
0:45:07 not protected from. And this is one of my argument about the problems that General Motors has
0:45:12 had and why the car buying experience is so bad is when you’re a General Motors manager
0:45:16 or executive, they just bring you a new car every four to six months. You don’t have to
0:45:21 deal with even gassing it or repairing it or the trade in or blah, blah, blah, that it’s
0:45:26 such a horrible experience that literally the people who make the cars are especially
0:45:31 the senior executives, they’re protected from the inconveniences and hassles and humiliations
0:45:36 that the rest of us have when we buy a car. So that’s one of the things that drives me
0:45:40 crazy when organizations not only are crappy, but they protect their executives and other
0:45:45 powerful people and critics from having a bad experience. Comcast is very high on my
0:45:52 back. I have had the same experience with Verizon and I happen to know someone on the
0:45:57 board of directors who just made everything magically happen for me. But as this was happening,
0:46:01 I was thinking, you know, well, what if you don’t know somebody on the board of directors
0:46:07 of Verizon? This is just wrong. And then I also know, Bob, that what you mentioned that
0:46:13 if I go on Twitter and I mentioned any brand by name and I say something is screwed up,
0:46:18 something is wrong, whatever, I get instant support, instant VIP treatment and that that’s
0:46:24 the only argument I can make for why you want a lot of followers and to stay on Twitter.
0:46:29 Now the one place where it may not help, by the way, healthcare, the problem with healthcare
0:46:34 in the US, we have many problems, but there’s so much friction and fragmentation that there
0:46:39 might be somebody in one spot, like one hospital or one insurance company who has some power,
0:46:45 but having mastery over the whole disconnected confused system, that’s one of the reasons
0:46:49 healthcare is so terrible. And we talk about this some in the book and there are some people
0:46:53 who are trying to deal with the friction and fragmentation in healthcare, but the pieces,
0:46:57 they don’t really fit together. So it doesn’t matter how powerful you are. And this happens
0:47:04 to some of my friends who their parents or they will get cancer. And we talk about the
0:47:09 cancer tax in the book and they just can’t believe how difficult it is to navigate the
0:47:14 system even though they’ve been doctors for 30 years and they thought that they were all
0:47:19 powerful because they had control over the little domain, but the healthcare system in
0:47:23 the US is really a problem in terms of gluing the pieces together. And some systems are
0:47:28 better than others, I would point to the Cleveland Clinic and I had heart surgery there and
0:47:32 I chose heart surgeries there over at Stanford 14 years ago. So I’m putting my body where
0:47:38 my mouth is here. They have a much better integrated system than most healthcare systems
0:47:42 do. We covered a gamut of good friction, bad friction,
0:47:47 assholes, mission-driven assholes. What else you want to talk about? What do you want people
0:47:52 to remember from Bob Sutton? First of all, I have been blessed in that
0:47:58 I mostly get to talk about and try to coach people in organizations. And the older I get,
0:48:02 the more that I realize it’s a lot easier to talk about and even to try to coach people
0:48:07 than to be in the pit trying to do the work of being a leader, being an engineer, being
0:48:13 an organizational or product designer, that it’s a lot easier to talk about and criticize
0:48:18 than to actually do it. So what’s that expression? The dog’s bark but the caravan rolls on. So
0:48:23 I realize I’ve been privileged to be a barking dog and paid pretty well for just barking rather
0:48:28 than getting in there. So I guess I try to learn from people who are smarter than me and
0:48:33 from the academic research about the best things to do. But I have a lot of respect
0:48:39 for everybody from CEOs, to middle managers, to engineers, to people on the front lines,
0:48:43 to people in the military, to people in government for how hard their jobs are to do. And I have
0:48:49 met very few people who have ill intention. And so I really do admire most people who
0:48:53 are actually in workplaces. Bob, I gotta agree with you, man. I tell you,
0:48:58 most of the people I meet in all my talks and all my visits and all that, they may even
0:49:02 work in the worst organization, I think, from the outside. But when you meet them, it’s
0:49:08 not them. They’re trying. It’s systems and other things. It’s not because they’re incompetent
0:49:13 or lazy or stupid. And I would especially point out to civil servants. So my friends
0:49:19 who did the work with the state of Michigan that reduced this benefit formed by 80% that
0:49:24 was filled out by 2.5 million people. One of them, Adam Seltzer, Stanford grad, and he
0:49:27 said, I thought I had to deal with these Michigan civil servants. They just wouldn’t care. And
0:49:33 he said they cared so much. They wanted to fix the system more than anybody so they could
0:49:38 be proud of their jobs rather than having to apologize and be ashamed of it.
0:49:43 Thank you for joining me for this episode of remarkable people. The most important part
0:49:49 of this episode is learning how to remove friction. And you can do this in order to
0:49:54 increase your effectiveness, to increase the effectiveness of your organization, and to
0:50:01 be a remarkable person and make the world a better place. So let’s remember Bob Sutton’s
0:50:07 advice about how to do that. Now I want to thank the remarkable people team. That would
0:50:14 be, of course, Tessa Nizmer, our researcher. Matt as a Nizmer, producer and co-author with
0:50:20 me in the book Think Remarkable. And then we have Louise Magana, Fallon Yates, and
0:50:27 Alexis Nishimura. And last but not least is our amazing sound design team. That would
0:50:35 be Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez. This is the remarkable people team. We wake up every
0:50:49 day thinking how can we help you be remarkable. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.
0:00:23 Helping me in this episode is the remarkable Bob Sutton. Bob is an organizational psychologist
0:00:29 and best-selling author. He’s known for his work on leadership, innovation, and workplace
0:00:37 dynamics. He and I go back a long way, and we are both students in the science of assholes.
0:00:43 Not in the medical sense, more in the behavior sense. He’s even written a book on the subject
0:00:50 called “The No Asshole Rule.” Bob was a professor of management science and engineering at
0:00:58 Stanford from 1983 to 2023. He is currently a professor emeritus there. His current book,
0:01:03 “The Friction Project,” how smart leaders make the right things easier and the wrong
0:01:11 things harder, is a must read. Today, we are going to discuss good friction and bad friction
0:01:19 and assholes. I’m Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, and now here is the remarkable Bob
0:01:32 Sutton. We got to go backwards in time a little bit. We got to catch up. Explain how
0:01:41 many took the arse test, the asshole test. The asshole rating self-exam is a test that
0:01:46 actually it’s in my best-selling book, “The No Asshole Rule.” It was not called the asshole
0:01:52 rating self-exam. It’s also a test that my wife wrote. Not me. Usually, I write everything.
0:01:56 My wife doesn’t even read my stuff, but she was running a large law firm at this time.
0:02:05 Aren’t you a lawyer? Aren’t you ever a lawyer? I was a law student for two weeks. Most people
0:02:12 take 20 years to figure out they hate law. I did it in two weeks. That’s all smart.
0:02:16 She was running a law firm with about 1,000 lawyers, and I said my editor wants a test.
0:02:21 You got any ideas? She just thought of all the behaviors of all the lawyers who she was
0:02:26 dealing with. She wrote in about 10 minutes and was in the book, but you read the book
0:02:31 and you said, “Let’s call this the asshole rating self-exam.” The rest is history. I
0:02:39 looked it up. People can still find the arse test at Guy Kawasaki. 613,000 people had completed
0:02:47 it last time I looked, which was in 2023. Thanks, Guy. Beautiful PR. You were a genius.
0:02:51 I’m not sure that book would have been a bestseller without you. You were very helpful at just
0:02:54 the right time. Thank you for all the royalty you’ve been
0:03:01 sending me over the years. Yeah, you’re welcome. It helped me pay for the secret heart tuition.
0:03:06 I had to pay some secret heart tuition too. Ouch. I’m so glad my kids went to Cal State
0:03:15 schools. I started saving money when they graduated high school. Have you ever done any statistical
0:03:21 analysis and figured out what the mean and average score of the arse test was? It’s not
0:03:28 a scientific test. You mean the average is polling? Yeah, it’s probably worse than electric
0:03:33 polling, to be honest. But the mean is about eight, so that means that you’re occasionally
0:03:38 an asshole. But who knows what the mean uses? Because a lot of times, even though it’s a
0:03:45 self-exam, people will fill it out with their boss in mind. So I do that sometimes. There
0:03:50 was a point where, to tell tales out of school, I had a chair at Stanford who I thought was
0:03:55 a certified asshole, and I just completed the arse to see how he got like a 12 out of
0:04:01 24, which is pretty high actually, in my biased opinion. So it can be used for other purposes.
0:04:08 With your current view of the world, do you think assholeness is on the rise or decline?
0:04:14 So there’s two views of this, and one is that there’s just a certain percentage of us who
0:04:18 are assholes, no matter what. And that’s what we call those certified assholes, or I guess
0:04:23 I call those certified assholes. You know, I use the name Donald Trump, I think pretty
0:04:27 consistently across times and people, he treats people like shit. He really does. So I would
0:04:31 say he’s a certified asshole, and I wasn’t so sure about Elon Musk, but he seems to be
0:04:37 in the category too. But then there’s people who, psychologists are fantastic at turning
0:04:41 people into assholes. You just put them in a hurry, you have them be sleep deprived. Being
0:04:46 around assholes is one of the best ways to act like an asshole. I mean, perfectly normal
0:04:50 people, they work with a bunch of assholes. It’s like they pick up the vibe. It’s contagious.
0:04:56 But my rough sense is that because of the internet, and because of the hurry sickness
0:05:04 that we have, and also another thing that does turn people nasty, is when there’s inequality.
0:05:10 And especially when inequality is obvious. I’ll give you an interesting example. One
0:05:14 of my colleagues, Katie Dacelles, who I do research with, she’s a psychologist, she studied
0:05:19 air rage, and she found out sometimes when you get in the plane, if you turn left, you
0:05:23 go to first class. And if you turn right, you go to coach. But other times you have to walk
0:05:28 through first class. If you found out in the planes where you have to walk through first
0:05:34 class, there’s more likely to be air rage by both people in first class and in coach,
0:05:41 because the inequality is made more obvious. She had a huge data set. So anything associated
0:05:44 with inequality, it actually brings out the worst in both the powerful and the powerless,
0:05:50 because the powerless kick down and the powerless kick up. So you end up with revolution in
0:05:56 domination. So my hunch is things might be getting a little bit worse, but for time in
0:06:00 memoriam, there’s always been a certain percentage of us who are certified assholes. And all
0:06:03 of us can be temporary assholes under the wrong conditions.
0:06:11 Do you think that being a certified mission driven asshole is okay? I’m referring specifically
0:06:17 to Steve Jobs. So let’s talk, you worked for Steve Jobs and I did not, especially in my
0:06:21 second asshole book, who knows, I should have written it, the asshole survival guy. I actually
0:06:25 did a lot of investigation about whether Steve was an asshole. And here’s at least what
0:06:30 I came up with. And my main source, this is in the book, was Ed Katmull. So Ed was head
0:06:38 of Pixar for 28 years, met with Steve every week for 27, 28 years. And here’s Ed’s perspective.
0:06:43 So I don’t know, believe it or not. But Ed’s perspective is that the Steve Jobs, who you
0:06:48 might have worked with, you worked with him before he was kicked out of the kingdom, right?
0:06:49 Before and after.
0:06:55 Oh, and after. So Ed’s point, and you may disagree, is that that Steve after he got kicked out
0:07:01 of the kingdom and had all the trouble at next, he actually became and went through the darkness
0:07:05 or the wilderness as Ed put it, he became actually a better person and a more humble
0:07:12 person. And in particular, coach Bill Campbell, who went for a walk with him every Sunday,
0:07:18 helped him, if you will, stifle his demons a little bit. So I know that’s accurate.
0:07:23 And there’s also another take on this, which is this one says I’ve spent way too much time
0:07:27 thinking about getting Silicon Valley gossip and stuff, is that there’s also the other
0:07:32 problem with the story. And Ed agreed with this is at Apple, he was more of an asshole
0:07:37 than Pixar because Pixar had a less ass holy culture. And it was just an investment for
0:07:42 him. It wasn’t like his life, like Apple was like his life. And he knew he was the smartest
0:07:47 person at Apple. He didn’t know he was the smartest person at Pixar and he had Ed Katmell
0:07:52 and people like that. Brad Bird, the great director. So there’s different takes on this.
0:07:57 And the other thing about Steve, which you probably know, is Steve would do amazingly
0:08:01 support of things for people that were just almost irrational. He could be very loving
0:08:06 and giving backstage. He didn’t donate any money to anybody. Lorraine Jobs is doing that
0:08:11 now. So there’s two takes that maybe he was an asshole who succeeded. And then the other
0:08:16 part is the Ed Katmell story that it was the Steve Jobs, who became at least less of an
0:08:21 asshole who got really, really rich. So I don’t know which is true, but those are different
0:08:27 stories that I tend to hear. Let’s face it, there are people who are assholes who do succeed.
0:08:32 We know this. Maybe Elon Musk will get fired from Tesla and come back a better person.
0:08:39 Elon Musk is not a good person. Maybe he was a, oh, gosh, a better person, a less bad
0:08:49 person. All right, so we covered the background here now. I love a good acronym. And I spent
0:08:55 a long time coming up with ours. Right. Although we chat GPT, we could come up with that in
0:09:01 five seconds. So I’m reading your book and I see gross, get rid of stupid shit. And
0:09:09 I saw that I said, Oh my God, that’s better than ours. And I think ours is pretty good.
0:09:16 Anyway, see, you want me to talk about it or you just want to talk about gross. So where
0:09:22 gross comes from is that all of us, at least in the United States, and I understand every
0:09:26 country in the world now has electronic medical records. And we know we go to the doctor,
0:09:31 the nurse practitioner or whatever, they spend the whole time filling out the form and looking
0:09:36 at the screen and never looking at us. And this is a worldwide problem. It’s actually
0:09:41 one of the main sources of stress for physicians and nurses to this drives them crazy. So there’s
0:09:44 a woman named Hawaii, you know something about Hawaii, aren’t you spending some time in Hawaii
0:09:50 these days? Yeah, absolutely. We just got back from Kauai just two days ago, beautiful
0:09:54 place. What a gorgeous. I hope you flew in first class and pissed off all the coach people
0:10:01 first class on the way there coach on the way back. The flight attendants were awesome,
0:10:05 by the way, I got to say to complain about United, but the flight attendants were awesome.
0:10:10 Yeah, but was it a plane that should have been passed through quality control? It was
0:10:19 a Boeing plane. Actually a 737 max. Oh, my God. So this woman, there’s a woman in
0:10:25 Hawaii Pacific, which is the largest healthcare system in Hawaii, her name’s Melinda Ashton.
0:10:30 And she was upset because they had these electronic medical records and all this stuff that people
0:10:34 had to spend all their time sort of staring at the screen. So she had this campaign and
0:10:38 she censored it. She said, getting rid of stupid stuff, even though it was really getting
0:10:44 rid of stupid shit. And she said, give suggestions to our team. Maybe we can figure out how to
0:10:51 simplify the systems. They got 188 suggestions, they implemented 87 and just one little example
0:10:56 and I think I wrote it. Here it is. So her team eliminated one click that was necessary
0:11:01 for patient rounds and at least according to their calculations, the approximately 1700
0:11:06 hours per month were saved at the four hospitals as a result. And our book is about friction
0:11:11 fixing and the challenge is a friction. And I love that example because our perspective
0:11:17 is no matter where you are in an organization, you can make things better or worse. And she
0:11:21 had the power to set up the getting rid of stupid stuff campaign, which by the way, this
0:11:26 was published in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title of gross a very respectable
0:11:32 academic journal. And she used her power to set up the gross system, getting rid of stupid
0:11:38 stuff system. And then people throughout the hospital, nurses, aides, nurses, doctors were
0:11:42 empowered to make suggestions, many of which were implemented. So to me, and this is a
0:11:46 lesson from this book, we started writing this book just because we were pissed off about
0:11:50 how hard it was to get things done. And all these organizations like Google, Google used
0:11:56 to be so easy to get things done. Now, honestly, Google, it’s so much harder to get things done
0:12:00 there than General Motors. They have a cash machine and General Motors has to make one
0:12:03 car at a time, which they usually lose money on. So it’s much harder to get things done
0:12:07 at Google than it is a General Motors right now. It’s just turned into this giant hair
0:12:12 ball of fiefdoms and bureaucracy. It’s just a mess. It’s nice having a hose that shoots
0:12:19 in the money. It is. I gave a talk at Google and I was paid, I don’t know, a few thousand
0:12:24 bucks and I’ve spent weeks trying to get the money. I had to become a vendor, then I had
0:12:29 to join SAP, then I had to join all this and that. I still haven’t been paid. And you’re
0:12:33 still filling out the forms. So that’s the same experience. Honestly, as we’re talking
0:12:37 about Google and speech, the other thing that I know about them is there’s actually four
0:12:42 or five groups that are fighting over who owns the speaking. And so there’s four or
0:12:47 five warring fiefdoms because, oh, so this is one of the other things that I like to
0:12:51 look out for in Silicon Valley companies. Oh, and my university, Stanford, also suffers
0:12:57 from this, by the way, which is spending money is a substitute for thinking. So where this
0:13:01 happens, we got so much money and you say, we’re going to buy some new software. We’re
0:13:06 going to start a new position. We’re going to start a new group. And pretty soon, your
0:13:11 organization is filled with groups and software that nobody knows how to use or weave together.
0:13:17 So yes, that sometimes money can be used to reduce friction. But sometimes the more money
0:13:20 you have, just the worse it gets, because you can buy more stuff and more people and
0:13:36 more buildings. And it’s like more money, more problems. So you know, I think bad friction
0:13:42 is kind of obvious. You already mentioned a great example, but what is good friction?
0:13:47 Ooh, to your point, when we started the book, it was like, and it’s hard to do the frictionless
0:13:53 organization. We want everything to be like really easy. But then along the way, we figured
0:13:57 out that something should be hard. Well, let’s start out with one of our many famous Stanford
0:14:04 dropouts, Elizabeth Holmes. So she didn’t like the fact that the device, the fraudulent
0:14:09 device that she developed to put it on US Army helicopters that she needed FDA approval.
0:14:13 She was really pissed off. In fact, she got General Mad Dog Mattis to put pressure on
0:14:18 the military to have her put it on anyways. And the bureaucrats fought back. And even
0:14:23 Mattis eventually had to agree that it should have FDA approval. So I think the fact that
0:14:29 it was impossible for her to put that in the helicopters is good. And to give you a contrary
0:14:35 example, so I’ve got two students they’re talked about in the book, amazing students,
0:14:40 Amanda Calabrese and Greta Meyer, they started a company called Sequel. They’re reinventing
0:14:45 the modern tampon. They spent their whole undergraduate career taking entrepreneurship
0:14:49 classes and figuring out the science of reinventing this tampon because their athletes, it was
0:14:55 leaking and everything. So they have reinvented the tampon. They claim after 80 years that
0:15:00 they finally reinvented the product. And they got FDA approval. They got $5 million in venture
0:15:05 capital and in the name of full disclosure, I have invested $25,000 in the company. And
0:15:09 I think it might be the first venture I’ve ever invested in, to be honest. I’m not like
0:15:14 a venture capitalist. Like, like you were at least, but they have gone the hard way.
0:15:20 So that’s an example. Some of the other things that should be slow bowing bowing. Talk about
0:15:25 bowing bowing. This is the classic case that to do things right, sometimes you have to
0:15:30 slow down, you know, slow down and fix things. Sometimes that actually has to work. Yes,
0:15:35 that’s really important. That when things are complicated, that rushing through and cutting
0:15:41 corners can kill people in the case of bowing. Fortunately, not us yet. One other thing,
0:15:44 which I think is important. I’ve been reading, if you’ve seen this book, remarkable people
0:15:49 who’ve seen this book, my copy came with socks. Most people don’t come with socks and a headphone.
0:15:53 I should be wearing the socks. Really cool socks. And my wife looked at me, she said,
0:15:57 Oh, those are high quality socks. So you’re not cheaping out. So anyway, so you know a
0:16:01 lot about creativity. And have you ever interviewed Teresa Mabley from Harvard Business School?
0:16:06 Just like somebody you might’ve tripped over. No, I don’t know who she is. Teresa’s been
0:16:12 studying creativity for 50 years. Mays started as a Stanford PhD and she’s just been studying
0:16:17 all aspects of creativity. And essentially, if you look at her work and other research,
0:16:22 you can’t hurry love, you can’t hurry creativity either. There’s a point where if you try to
0:16:27 rush it, the problem is there’s a really high failure rate. There tends to be constructive
0:16:34 disagreement. It’s a messy, complicated process with a low success rate. And one of my favorite
0:16:39 stories that’s in the book was when Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed by the Harvard Business
0:16:44 Review. And they said, could McKinsey have made your process for Seinfeld more efficient?
0:16:48 And he asked who McKinsey was, and they told him he was a consulting firm. And then he
0:16:53 said, are they funny? And they said, no, believe me, we know McKinsey, they are not funny.
0:16:57 They may be other things. They are not funny. And then he said, the hard way is the right
0:17:02 way. It’s not something you make more efficient. And just the same is the venture capital world,
0:17:07 the way that Jerry Seinfeld does a routine is he goes to venues that are very small and
0:17:12 tries a few hundred jokes and keeps 15 or 20 of them for a set or something like that.
0:17:17 So creativity is inefficient. Another thing that isn’t efficient, and I just said you
0:17:23 can’t hurry love. There’s all this evidence that the most effective teams, everything
0:17:29 from startup teams to surgical teams, to people actually who fly airplanes to that the more
0:17:34 they’ve worked together, the more effective they are like Charlie Munger and, and more
0:17:39 in Buffett. So you got that. And then the last and I just thinking of you at this stage
0:17:44 of your life and that surfing, which I just, I admire you with the surfing so much. It’s
0:17:48 just amazing how late in life you started, how into it you are Bob, just in the street
0:17:56 of transparency, I rescheduled this interview because I wanted to surf. I said that to my
0:18:05 wife. I bet he’s surfing. Hooray for you. All right. Where’d you go surfing Santa Cruz?
0:18:10 Oh, good for you. All right. Bless your heart. You’re pretty sunburned too. So this stuff
0:18:14 tails perfectly with you. You’re surfing this morning. I hope you that the waves are good.
0:18:18 You had a nice ride actually. There’s this amazing research, which we just started getting
0:18:23 into at the book. It’s on savoring. And so there’s all this research about coping and
0:18:28 there’s all this bad stuff in life we got to deal with. But this guy’s name is Fred Bryant.
0:18:33 He’s from the University of Michigan originally. And he’s been savoring this notion that have
0:18:40 good mental health. What you do is you anticipate something great. You enjoy it while it’s happening.
0:18:46 You reflect on how wonderful it is. It’s not just rushing through and checking the boxes.
0:18:51 And so to me, this idea of strategic slowness, and yes, there’s some things you got to do
0:18:55 really fast. If the blood’s squirting out of me, I want the surgeon to sew me up really
0:18:59 fast. I don’t want him or her to slow down and enjoy the moment. I want to get that
0:19:04 shit done. But that idea of savoring is another thing just from a leadership perspective to
0:19:11 slow down and to enjoy people and celebrate. And one of our mutual friends, David Kelly
0:19:17 of IDEO fame, back in the 90s, I hung out at IDEO a lot. And that’s one thing David
0:19:22 was always so good about, which was like when they completed a project or they had something
0:19:26 to celebrate. And that was a very intensive place in terms of how people work. In those
0:19:31 days, he would rent an ice cream truck to come to IDEO and give away everybody a free
0:19:36 ice cream in the company, just to get people to relax and enjoy life. And so that’s another
0:19:41 time and maybe because we’re both 70 at this point in my life, that a savoring sounds like
0:19:42 a pretty good deal.
0:19:48 Actually, you also brought in your book, the Ikea effect, right? Which is savoring too.
0:19:51 Savoring is strategic. That’s making other people suffer. So this is the notion that
0:19:57 labor leads to love. The Ikea effect is the harder you work at something independently
0:20:01 of its value, the more you’re going to think it’s important to justify all that effort
0:20:05 you put into it. And my favorite thing about the Ikea effect studies, and we all know you
0:20:10 go to Ikea, it’s impossible to get through the place even. But the Ikea effect where
0:20:14 they do the experiments was they show people a box and say, how much would you pay for
0:20:18 this box? And people, it would sound like a buck 50 or something. And then they’d have
0:20:21 them assemble the box and then they’d say, how much would you pay for the box? It’d be
0:20:27 like three bucks because I put all this work into my stinking box. So that’s the Ikea effect
0:20:32 is a notion that labor leads to love, which every fraternity, sorority and military in
0:20:37 the world knows that the Navy seals that the suffering, this must be worth it. I’m suffering.
0:20:43 We actually had Mike Norton on this week’s episode of the podcast. We’re familiar with
0:20:49 the concept. So okay, but now listen, as I was reading your book, it was like very clear
0:20:53 to me, okay, so there’s bad friction. You got to take that out. I understand the good
0:20:59 friction which leads to savoring and higher quality and all that kind of stuff. I give
0:21:05 you a theoretical example because I struggle with the contextual judgment of friction.
0:21:11 So let me give you an example. So some of my friends, they have put astroturf on their
0:21:16 lawns. They don’t have grass anymore. They put astroturf. So you could say that astroturf
0:21:21 has reduced friction. There’s no more watering, no more mowing, no more all that. But you
0:21:27 could also say that a lawn, a regular lawn increases good friction because you’re outdoors,
0:21:32 you’re exercising, you’re interacting with your neighbors, but then you’ve got to use
0:21:39 a gas lawnmower to create pollution. So what is astroturf? Good friction or bad friction?
0:21:44 Honestly, this is a complete value judgment. I would say that some things that are low
0:21:49 friction are just bad tastes. And if your friends have bad tastes in low friction, that’s
0:21:56 just fine. You know what it reminds me a little bit of? There was this doctor I knew who every
0:22:01 morning what he would do when he had coffee, he would take really cheap instant coffee,
0:22:04 he would dump the water and he’d stick in the microwave oven and he’d stir it and he’d
0:22:10 drink it and then run out the door. And that’s astroturf. That’s very low friction. But go
0:22:15 back, I don’t see any savoring in there. I savour my cup of coffee. In my perspective
0:22:20 in that it’s like, why doesn’t he just take caffeine? Like you don’t even need to drink
0:22:25 coffee at all. If your goal is just to get the caffeine, probably better for your stomach.
0:22:31 So anyways, I would just stick with what is low friction, bad taste.
0:22:38 Could you make the case that the postal servers, pony express, telephone, telegraph, email,
0:22:41 text messaging, zoom, all remove too much friction?
0:22:45 Why do you say that?
0:22:49 Because all of those things meant no more face-to-face interaction.
0:22:56 We’re talking about a situation where there’s, or even, and now the same thing is instant
0:23:01 checkout. So in the process of the frictionless organization, we’re also removing the possibility
0:23:06 for human interaction. So in fact, in the book we talk about, and this is back to savoring,
0:23:10 there’s a chain of grocery stores. The largest grocery store chain in the Netherlands are
0:23:16 called Jumbo. And what they did is, for senior citizens like us, who might be lonely, they
0:23:17 came up with the slow…
0:23:19 I’m a senior citizen. I’m not lonely.
0:23:23 Me neither. In fact, I wish I was a little more lonely sometimes.
0:23:24 Less friction.
0:23:31 I spent four days with my adult kids. No, eight days. So anyways, for those who are lonely,
0:23:35 they have these chit chat lanes or slow checkout lanes. And we just fact check this. They start
0:23:40 this in one store, and they’ve scaled it to 225 of their stores. And the idea is you’re
0:23:45 getting in knowing it’s sort of like a slow experience. So there are some things that
0:23:50 should be higher friction for more sort of social interaction. And certainly that makes
0:23:53 sense. And we know that it’s like when you go to a three-star Michelin restaurant, you
0:23:56 don’t want to get in and out in 15 minutes. That’s not what the goal is.
0:23:57 Wow.
0:24:03 That is an interesting concept, man. I got to tell you though, Bob, I love whole foods
0:24:08 because I can just hold my right palm over the sensor. And I don’t have to get out my
0:24:12 wallet. I don’t even have to get out my iPhone. I told my kids, if I’m about to die, cut off
0:24:16 my hand. You can get free groceries the rest of your life.
0:24:23 So that’s actually a good example, even though it’s morbid about cutting off your hands,
0:24:27 that what good organizational design, and that’s why we have the subtitle, that the
0:24:32 right things are easy and the wrong things are harder or slower. But the other thing
0:24:39 is I also think we’re oversimplifying this in two ways. One is, and this is one of my
0:24:47 favorite examples, is that what good leaders do, is they figure out how to, or designers,
0:24:52 how to use good friction to get rid of bad friction. So one of my favorite examples,
0:24:56 and so we’ve been bashing Google, so I’ll say something good about Google. You may know
0:25:02 Lazlo Bach, maybe Lazlo on your show, show his book, Work Rules, great guy, he was basically
0:25:08 head of HR, people operations, whatever they call it, Google for eight years. So gets there,
0:25:11 and Larry and Sergey did a pretty good job building the company and building the culture
0:25:16 in the early days, but there’s always that problem that stuff that worked in the beginning
0:25:21 gets to be a problem. And one of the things they did in building the culture was, and
0:25:27 I remember actually, I have a tape recording from 2002 where I interviewed Larry Page where
0:25:32 he was said, we’re interviewing people 10, 15, 20 times, because we want to build the
0:25:37 right culture. And maybe that made sense in the early days. But so Lazlo gets there some
0:25:44 years later, and the tradition continues. And he said, we’ve got people interviewing,
0:25:49 and I remember doing the fact checking with him 10, 12, 15 times, he said 25 times. Sometimes
0:25:53 you get interviewed for a job 25 times, and you don’t get the offer. This is a good way
0:25:58 to waste a lot of effort. So anyway, so he came up with a simple rule, which is if you’re
0:26:04 going to do more than four job interviews, you just have to write me for written permission.
0:26:10 That was the whole simple rule. And he said, magically, the excessive interviews disappeared
0:26:14 almost immediately. And so to go back to the lesson, what good designers are always trying
0:26:21 to do is, is to make it hard for people to add stuff that slows the whole system down.
0:26:27 And the one that I’m doing some research on now with my friends at Asana is we even had
0:26:31 this on this call, which is that I saw two apps and I went to the wrong app and you had
0:26:36 to send me the email for the right app. And what happens in many organizations, including
0:26:42 my employer, Stanford, if you have a credit card at Stanford, you can buy software for
0:26:48 your use or your team’s use that therefore you impose on everybody who deals with you.
0:26:52 And so what you end up having in organizations is they call this the credit card problem
0:26:56 is just zillions of different kind of software and the causes switching and confusion and
0:27:00 learning problems. And so what’s happening in some of the companies we’re working with
0:27:07 is the CTOs are putting in more obstacles when you try to buy or renew software. So
0:27:12 that to me can be good friction. So so that’s one thing that I like to think about. The other
0:27:17 thing, which I think is also important is friction can be weaponized. So it’s good for
0:27:23 you and bad for other people. In the most extreme case here, of course, what they call Roche
0:27:29 motels, which is the example we’ve all had, you subscribe to something. I had this with
0:27:35 the Financial Times, for example. And it’s absolutely impossible to get out of it where
0:27:39 they ask you, are you sure you want to get out? This is a mistake, Mr. Sutton. And I
0:27:44 remember the Financial Times, I had to go through 15 different questions. And finally,
0:27:48 no, no, no, I want to get up. No, no, no, I want to get out of which this, by the way,
0:27:52 is unlawful in the state of California, but not other states now. But that’s another kind
0:27:57 of way in which friction is uses weaponized to make it impossible for us to get rid of
0:28:04 software and gym memberships things. When I read that example, it brought to mind something
0:28:10 that I just happened to me last week. I quit MailChimp. I deleted my MailChimp account.
0:28:15 And it was in five seconds. It was so fast. I thought something is wrong here. I could
0:28:21 not have quit. And then I quit so fast. I went on LinkedIn and I went on threads and
0:28:26 I said, kudos to MailChimp. They let me quit so easily. If only the rest of their company
0:28:33 worked that well. But that’s actually interesting because when
0:28:38 we were working on the book, we talked to some of the folks at Netflix who were involved
0:28:43 in the decision long before it was the law to make it really easy to quit. And including
0:28:49 Patty McCord, who was head of H that are there for years for 14 years. And she said two things.
0:28:53 She said, first of all, in the early days, when it was hard to quit, we were just embarrassed.
0:28:56 Our friends would say, I tried to quit Netflix. It would be terrible. And the other thing
0:29:01 she said, and this is the MailChimp thing, is she said, we actually figured out from
0:29:06 a long term strategic standpoint that if it was easy to quit, we’d have really good data
0:29:10 about dissatisfaction because that’s much better than giving people a survey. If they’re
0:29:15 quitting easily, you get much more sensitive data about dissatisfaction. So one of the
0:29:19 reasons she argued that Netflix has done so well in the long term is they’ve always had
0:29:24 great data about customer dissatisfaction because it’s so easy to quit. And also it’s
0:29:28 not a subscription. You can quit anytime. Wow. I never thought of that. It makes intuitive
0:29:32 sense. If you’re so happy, it was easy to quit. You’re willing to invest some time
0:29:36 giving the company feedback. That makes perfect sense.
0:29:41 Also the other thing Patty said about making it easy to quit is to come back, that you’re
0:29:43 not going to get in a Roche Motel. Yeah.
0:29:47 That you can quit again. The example is not to call out one of my daughters, but I got
0:29:51 a daughter. I think you might have met Eve, went to school with your son. So Eve, with
0:29:56 all due respect, she’s like the Emelda Marcos of the family. She loves her shoes. She has
0:30:00 so many shoes. In fact, she just went to Europe with her boyfriend and she sent me
0:30:04 a picture of how proud she was of how she packed her five pairs of shoes in the suitcase
0:30:11 for a carry-on. Literally. She’s a shoe girl. So anyway, I see only five pairs. Oh, six.
0:30:18 She was wearing one, remember? So anyway, for her, that’s nothing. So anyway, I see
0:30:23 how many shoes she returns to Amazon. It’s just amazing. I honestly think that she only
0:30:27 keeps one out of four pairs of shoes because unfortunately I see it because I think when
0:30:34 I’m 90 and my kids are 50, they’re still going to be in the family Amazon. Up next on Remarkable
0:30:40 People. One definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience that the little people
0:30:45 have to deal with. So what they’ll do as senior executives, and I guess whiny professors like
0:30:51 me, is that they create a completely friction free experience that the little people are
0:30:55 not protected from.
0:31:00 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show
0:31:06 for you. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review
0:31:13 it. Even better, forward it to a friend, a big mahalo to you for doing this.
0:31:18 Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:31:23 I loved your example. We’re going all over the map in this interview, but I loved your
0:31:29 example about how much TSA Pre has helped people. That is so true.
0:31:35 Yeah, let’s talk about that because TSA Pre is an example of something that has made all
0:31:41 of our lives easier. But the other thing, and yes, we can all bash government for not
0:31:45 being efficient enough. And yes, oh God, we know how terrible the bureaucracy is and how
0:31:49 hard things can be to get done, and I can tell my stories and I’m sure you can. But there
0:31:52 are bright spots in government.
0:31:53 Yes.
0:31:57 And I think it’s important to give people credit. In the book, we talk about this amazing group
0:32:02 in Michigan. There was a benefits form that 2.5 million Michiganders filled out a year
0:32:07 to get healthcare, to get food stamps, things like that. Longest benefits form in the United
0:32:13 States, 1,000 questions. One question was, when was your child conceived? This was like
0:32:20 just crazy form. And a guy named Michael Brennan did the work to work with the bureaucrats,
0:32:25 to work with the frontline employees over two years. And the lawyers, because you do
0:32:29 a new form, you’ve got to have a lot of lawyers, you’ve got a lot to comply to. Now there’s
0:32:35 a form that’s 80% shorter that’s filled out by 2.5 million Michiganders. So there is hope.
0:32:39 And now people don’t seem to believe us, but the California DMV is actually getting a little
0:32:40 bit better.
0:32:43 Oh, I think it’s much better.
0:32:44 I’m glad to hear that.
0:32:52 I absolutely agree. I spoke to the CIOs of all of California and the DMV was there.
0:32:57 And I said, the fact that you can go on the California DMV website and get your number
0:33:02 before you leave for the office is amazing.
0:33:05 Because I don’t want to overstate it, because we do talk about an example in the book of
0:33:11 a guy who came out and made my visit to the DMV much more pleasant and faster than I ever
0:33:13 expected by basically doing triage.
0:33:17 But now, Huggy and I are doing a case study with Steve Gordon, a guy from Cisco, who’s
0:33:23 head of the DMV. He’s visited all 180 field offices of the DMV. And he’s asked how to
0:33:29 improve stuff. He’s done all this digitization stuff. So, yes, there are still challenges
0:33:33 of just having visited the DMV again last week to get my real ID. It’s not perfect.
0:33:38 There are still some unhappy people, but you get through there faster. The employees are
0:33:39 more friendly and supportive.
0:33:40 Yeah, they agree.
0:33:45 It’s not perfect, but it’s an example that government can be made better, even the DMV.
0:33:48 And so that’s what I’ve been saying to my friends.
0:33:50 Oh, we agree on that. We agree on that.
0:33:51 Good.
0:33:53 So, let’s say people are listening to this and they’re saying, okay, enough with the
0:34:00 stories, boys. Just tell me, how do I add good friction and how do I remove bad friction?
0:34:01 What’s the tactics?
0:34:07 The book has a bazillion interventions points, but the main points we have are, we call it
0:34:13 oblivious leaders. If you’re a leader, try to be aware of what we call your cone of friction.
0:34:18 How your behavior influences people around you. Are you writing overly long emails? Are
0:34:23 you keeping them too long in meetings? Are you calling too many meetings? A great example,
0:34:28 a well-known software firm that I know. I won’t name it, but some people may guess.
0:34:33 There was 400 vice presidents. They were complaining there were too many Slack messages. The Slack
0:34:38 messages were too long and they were irrelevant. And the head of learning development, she
0:34:42 interrupts me and she says, so who’s sending those Slack messages? Could each one of you
0:34:44 please look in the mirror?
0:34:50 And so that to me is an example of the sort of oblivious executive, so it’s your executive
0:34:56 behavior. The next one we talk about is the notion of trying to stem what we call addition
0:35:01 sickness. There’s all sorts of evidence that as human beings, our natural way of solving
0:35:08 problems is to add and add and add and add. More people, more software, more initiatives.
0:35:13 But what good organizations do is they have some discipline about subtraction. A quick
0:35:20 thing we’ve done, and we use the example already of the getting rid of stupid stuff exercise
0:35:24 in Hawaii, is that we’ve played something we call the subtraction game with more than
0:35:28 200 organizations. That’s what we were doing with the unnamed large software company is
0:35:34 we said, what should you get rid of? And we sometimes it’s just like BS, but other times
0:35:39 they actually make progress. And just one little example, I was working with a pharmaceutical
0:35:45 company in the general counsel head lawyer, he said, I’m counting this in the middle of
0:35:50 playing the subtraction game, what should get rid of? We have 80 family leave policies
0:35:53 because they’re in different countries and everything. And he wrote me back two weeks
0:35:57 later that he’d gotten it down to 60. Now that’s not completely trimming, but that’s
0:36:02 an example. And then two more one is broken connections, look at the handoffs in your
0:36:07 organization and fix them in healthcare. That’s a huge issue. And then finally, my favorite
0:36:13 jargon monoxide, which are essentially the incomprehensible language that people use
0:36:19 in your organization that nobody can understand. And to put in a word for chat GPT in this
0:36:27 crazy times, if you instruct chat GPT to make things simpler and to bring down the reading
0:36:31 level, you can actually simplify the language in your organization. So I’m just doing a
0:36:36 rant, but to reduce destructive friction, what’s your behavior as a leader? What can
0:36:41 you subtract handoffs in that file jargon monoxide? You clean up your language basically.
0:36:47 This is an example of this vice provost of Stanford sending out an email with 1300 words
0:36:54 and 7300 word attachment attachment. And so I know what I think, but don’t you think
0:37:00 if he or she had stuck that email in chat GPT and says simplify this, make it high school
0:37:06 reading level, it would have been 10 times better. Yes. And just to be clear, so this
0:37:11 was an email that was sent out to all 2000 tenure track faculty, inviting us to spend
0:37:17 a Saturday, a full Saturday brainstorming on zoom about the new door sustainability
0:37:21 school. So it was just like, please give us your time in your city at home during the
0:37:27 pandemic. And I did immediately forward the email to her boss and suggest that this this
0:37:32 was not good management. But yes, if that person had put in chat GPT, it would have
0:37:37 been much shorter. And there are some great uses of chat GPT. In addition to the fact
0:37:42 that it’s fun to poke one of my bosses that there was a surgical consent form that was
0:37:47 used by the largest healthcare provider in the state of Rhode Island. I can’t remember
0:37:51 the name right now. And what they did was they took their form, which was at the 12th
0:37:55 grade reading level, and it was three pages long. And they said made it make it simpler
0:38:00 and for in shorter. And what they got back was something that was about a page long and
0:38:04 was at the sixth grade reading level. And now they’re using more or less what they got
0:38:10 back for 35,000 people a year, chat GPT and all these large language models. The problem
0:38:14 is they’re more efficient for adding friction, because you can just use it to write zillions
0:38:19 of emails and and to change things. So you got to be careful that it can be weaponized
0:38:24 against people. But if we’re disciplined and view it as an as an editing tool, rather than
0:38:27 an addition tool, it could help us.
0:38:32 Maybe there’s a product idea there that slack could offer this feature where every message
0:38:37 you send in slack will first go through our AI and we’ll simplify it for you. And then
0:38:41 I’ll come out the other and it’ll be shorter and better.
0:38:47 So I would not be surprised if that already exists. There’s a woman named Clarish I who
0:38:53 is one of my students, former students and is head of AI at Salesforce. And I think she
0:38:57 would say that something like that may have been developed already. I’m not sure, but
0:39:05 I think it may actually exist. Okay. So now let’s talk about friction again. And how hard
0:39:12 or easy should it be for a party to change their presidential candidate?
0:39:18 Well, I don’t mean to be political, but I will be political. Yes, I think that it should
0:39:21 be easy. And it’s interesting that to tell you a story out of school, a good friend of
0:39:25 mine is Adam Grant. I knew him before he was so famous. It was ridiculous. And he’s always
0:39:31 been a man. So the number of messages we exchange being concerned about Joe Biden’s behavior
0:39:36 is unbelievable. But Adam being Adam that three days later, he had a piece in New York Times
0:39:41 describing this as an example of escalating commitment to a failing course of action.
0:39:46 As publicly you commit to something the harder it is to get rid of. And especially when you’re
0:39:49 surrounded with people have an incentive for you to keep going even though they know it’s
0:39:54 not for the greater good, something has to be done about it. So yes, it should be easier.
0:40:03 Okay, so now what companies are in the Sutton Hall of Friction fame for removing friction
0:40:09 in an outstanding way? Well, so the idea that there’s companies that are consistently great
0:40:14 at it, I think they go through periods where they’re good and where they’re bad. I do think
0:40:20 just to name a couple and they have other problems. Amazon’s actually from the beginning
0:40:25 been quite good. And I think Jeff Bezos is very, very disciplined about being frugal,
0:40:30 but also being customer focused. And 2014, I gave a speech up there, which of course
0:40:35 was unpaid, which was part of the frugality. And I remember just asking them, so what’s
0:40:40 sacred and what’s taboo taboo here? And almost in unison, they said what’s sacred is the
0:40:45 customer and what’s taboo is wasting money. And they’re very good about using people’s
0:40:50 times during meetings. And it’s not just frugality, it’s they’re a disciplined company. So I think
0:40:55 that Amazon actually would be pretty good. The other one, which is more controversial
0:41:00 and maybe almost too much. And I am going there to give a talk in a couple of weeks
0:41:05 is Walmart, which is the largest private employer in the United States. They really have a lot
0:41:11 of discipline about, for example, organizational simplicity. Walmart only has eight, eight
0:41:16 levels of hierarchy from the store manager to the CEO. And if I compare that, let’s say
0:41:20 to what is it Metaslash Facebook, which has, I think they’re trying to reduce them now.
0:41:26 They have something like 12 a while ago. And so those are some that come to mind. And then
0:41:34 I even hate to bring up Jensen, Wong and Nvidia, but man, talk about a disciplined place and
0:41:39 the nature of their discipline. And it’s good to compare them to Amazon and to Walmart
0:41:44 because Walmart and Amazon are command and control places. They really are. It’s top
0:41:49 down. You will do what you are told kind of places. But the difference for Nvidia is that
0:41:54 the way that they do it is by cultural control. I think he’s got 50 direct reports, which
0:41:58 according to some of my other work, it should be impossible for a CEO to have 50 direct
0:42:04 reports and do their job. But if you trust them completely and you don’t micromanage
0:42:09 them completely, and maybe it’s possible. So maybe my theory about organizational design
0:42:14 is wrong. So I was talking to a woman just two weeks ago who’s working at Nvidia. She
0:42:18 was like an accountant. She’s been working there for about 15 years. And all this stuff
0:42:23 about remote work, how many days a week do we have? We know this. There’s just a huge
0:42:28 amount of research and argument. And Jamie Dimmond is saying they got to be back in the
0:42:33 office, blah, blah, blah. And so I said, so what’s Jensen’s take on this? Oh, Jensen trusts
0:42:37 us and he says that we each should do what’s best for us, even though we have really, really
0:42:42 nice offices to go to. What a concept. Trusting people. You get rid of a lot of friction.
0:42:47 If you don’t spend all that time watching them really, really closely and monitoring
0:42:51 them really, really closely and always being worried about the lawsuit, and then do something
0:42:55 wrong. And then in organizations like that, we have a strong culture. When somebody does
0:42:59 something wrong, it doesn’t have to be top down. Their colleagues will slam them because
0:43:04 they’re ruining it for all of us. And we know that’s that’s what a good culture.
0:43:11 So now who’s in the Sutton Hall of Friction, shame, shame? I hate to say it, but I know
0:43:17 too much about it. I believe my employer, Stanford, God love them. I think that we have
0:43:21 got serious problems that we make things much harder than they need to be for faculty, staff
0:43:28 and students. And in my aforementioned argument before is that sometimes organizations, they
0:43:32 can’t get rid of the friction, but other times they have enough money that they spend money
0:43:36 as a substitute for thinking. I think we do some of that. And then the one that I really
0:43:43 would call out and I talk about in the book is Comcast. Comcast, try their phone tree.
0:43:49 You want bad AI. They make it virtually impossible for you to get through to a human. And I’m
0:43:53 not alone in bashing Comcast. And I talk about this in the book. One thing they do that makes
0:43:59 it even worse. So when I had trouble getting through to Comcast, my mother had passed away
0:44:05 and was dealing with a bunch of complicated issues for a house. I actually wrote on Twitter
0:44:11 complaining about Comcast. And I know a board member. I won’t name him, but I met him three
0:44:16 or four times. So he writes me like a personal message and says, I’ll get you to someone.
0:44:24 So three days later, I’m on like the VIP line. So I call one ring and somebody in Arizona
0:44:28 and everything was fixed immediately. And then they did something else for my son in
0:44:32 San Francisco. And they went in person. And they didn’t charge us. It was the nicest person
0:44:39 you ever met. And so the problem that Comcast has, which some organizations have, some airlines
0:44:44 and sometimes General Motors too, is one of the reasons the system is so screwed up is
0:44:50 that one definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience that the little people have
0:44:55 to deal with. So what they’ll do as senior executives, and I guess whiny professors like
0:45:01 me is that they create a completely friction free experience that the little people are
0:45:07 not protected from. And this is one of my argument about the problems that General Motors has
0:45:12 had and why the car buying experience is so bad is when you’re a General Motors manager
0:45:16 or executive, they just bring you a new car every four to six months. You don’t have to
0:45:21 deal with even gassing it or repairing it or the trade in or blah, blah, blah, that it’s
0:45:26 such a horrible experience that literally the people who make the cars are especially
0:45:31 the senior executives, they’re protected from the inconveniences and hassles and humiliations
0:45:36 that the rest of us have when we buy a car. So that’s one of the things that drives me
0:45:40 crazy when organizations not only are crappy, but they protect their executives and other
0:45:45 powerful people and critics from having a bad experience. Comcast is very high on my
0:45:52 back. I have had the same experience with Verizon and I happen to know someone on the
0:45:57 board of directors who just made everything magically happen for me. But as this was happening,
0:46:01 I was thinking, you know, well, what if you don’t know somebody on the board of directors
0:46:07 of Verizon? This is just wrong. And then I also know, Bob, that what you mentioned that
0:46:13 if I go on Twitter and I mentioned any brand by name and I say something is screwed up,
0:46:18 something is wrong, whatever, I get instant support, instant VIP treatment and that that’s
0:46:24 the only argument I can make for why you want a lot of followers and to stay on Twitter.
0:46:29 Now the one place where it may not help, by the way, healthcare, the problem with healthcare
0:46:34 in the US, we have many problems, but there’s so much friction and fragmentation that there
0:46:39 might be somebody in one spot, like one hospital or one insurance company who has some power,
0:46:45 but having mastery over the whole disconnected confused system, that’s one of the reasons
0:46:49 healthcare is so terrible. And we talk about this some in the book and there are some people
0:46:53 who are trying to deal with the friction and fragmentation in healthcare, but the pieces,
0:46:57 they don’t really fit together. So it doesn’t matter how powerful you are. And this happens
0:47:04 to some of my friends who their parents or they will get cancer. And we talk about the
0:47:09 cancer tax in the book and they just can’t believe how difficult it is to navigate the
0:47:14 system even though they’ve been doctors for 30 years and they thought that they were all
0:47:19 powerful because they had control over the little domain, but the healthcare system in
0:47:23 the US is really a problem in terms of gluing the pieces together. And some systems are
0:47:28 better than others, I would point to the Cleveland Clinic and I had heart surgery there and
0:47:32 I chose heart surgeries there over at Stanford 14 years ago. So I’m putting my body where
0:47:38 my mouth is here. They have a much better integrated system than most healthcare systems
0:47:42 do. We covered a gamut of good friction, bad friction,
0:47:47 assholes, mission-driven assholes. What else you want to talk about? What do you want people
0:47:52 to remember from Bob Sutton? First of all, I have been blessed in that
0:47:58 I mostly get to talk about and try to coach people in organizations. And the older I get,
0:48:02 the more that I realize it’s a lot easier to talk about and even to try to coach people
0:48:07 than to be in the pit trying to do the work of being a leader, being an engineer, being
0:48:13 an organizational or product designer, that it’s a lot easier to talk about and criticize
0:48:18 than to actually do it. So what’s that expression? The dog’s bark but the caravan rolls on. So
0:48:23 I realize I’ve been privileged to be a barking dog and paid pretty well for just barking rather
0:48:28 than getting in there. So I guess I try to learn from people who are smarter than me and
0:48:33 from the academic research about the best things to do. But I have a lot of respect
0:48:39 for everybody from CEOs, to middle managers, to engineers, to people on the front lines,
0:48:43 to people in the military, to people in government for how hard their jobs are to do. And I have
0:48:49 met very few people who have ill intention. And so I really do admire most people who
0:48:53 are actually in workplaces. Bob, I gotta agree with you, man. I tell you,
0:48:58 most of the people I meet in all my talks and all my visits and all that, they may even
0:49:02 work in the worst organization, I think, from the outside. But when you meet them, it’s
0:49:08 not them. They’re trying. It’s systems and other things. It’s not because they’re incompetent
0:49:13 or lazy or stupid. And I would especially point out to civil servants. So my friends
0:49:19 who did the work with the state of Michigan that reduced this benefit formed by 80% that
0:49:24 was filled out by 2.5 million people. One of them, Adam Seltzer, Stanford grad, and he
0:49:27 said, I thought I had to deal with these Michigan civil servants. They just wouldn’t care. And
0:49:33 he said they cared so much. They wanted to fix the system more than anybody so they could
0:49:38 be proud of their jobs rather than having to apologize and be ashamed of it.
0:49:43 Thank you for joining me for this episode of remarkable people. The most important part
0:49:49 of this episode is learning how to remove friction. And you can do this in order to
0:49:54 increase your effectiveness, to increase the effectiveness of your organization, and to
0:50:01 be a remarkable person and make the world a better place. So let’s remember Bob Sutton’s
0:50:07 advice about how to do that. Now I want to thank the remarkable people team. That would
0:50:14 be, of course, Tessa Nizmer, our researcher. Matt as a Nizmer, producer and co-author with
0:50:20 me in the book Think Remarkable. And then we have Louise Magana, Fallon Yates, and
0:50:27 Alexis Nishimura. And last but not least is our amazing sound design team. That would
0:50:35 be Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez. This is the remarkable people team. We wake up every
0:50:49 day thinking how can we help you be remarkable. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.
In this episode of Remarkable People, join host Guy Kawasaki as he engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Bob Sutton, a renowned organizational psychologist, best-selling author, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. Together, they explore the intricacies of organizational behavior, leadership, and workplace dynamics. Sutton shares insights from his latest book, “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder,” challenging conventional wisdom about efficiency and productivity. Discover how to identify and eliminate bad friction while cultivating good friction in your organization. From the science of assholes to the art of savoring, this episode offers practical wisdom for leaders, managers, and anyone looking to create more effective and humane workplaces. Learn how to navigate the complexities of modern organizations and champion a new era of leadership that prioritizes both productivity and people.
—
Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable.
With his decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy’s questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.
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