Origins of ‘The Friction Project’ - Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao (Stanford)

I'd love to kick it off with you sharing your origin story of this venture, of the Friction Project.

You know, I love the fact, Ravi, you described the book as a venture. I would modify it just a little bit. It was more of an adventure for me. I mean, truly, it was something we sort of got into without, frankly, a lot of forethought in that sense, because we'd written a book called Scaling Up Excellence. You know, how do you take spread goodness in an organization? How do you take a venture from the startup scale and scale it up so that it becomes big and better as opposed to being dumb? And as we were presenting the material from the Scaling Up Excellence book, we discovered that the top echelons of leadership in a company, or the senior echelons, they really loved the message. But as we went lower down, people loved the message. But their love for the message came with a perennial lament. And the lament was, it's really hard to do anything or get anything done in my company. I'm going to give two bookends just to give you a sense of what we encountered. You know, I remember Bob and I asking an executive a seemingly innocent question. Where do you work? And the guy looks with a glint in his eye and he says, I work in a frustration factory. I just like, man, how does this guy go to work in the first place? And then there's another young woman whom I can never forget, and she was kind of describing how she poured herself at work, doing busy work and largely inconsequential work. And she said, I go home and all I've left are scraps of myself for my family. That was like a blow to the solar plexus, I'd say. And that's how we said, hey, we really need to understand friction Land in organizations.

So I would add to that. I think there's also some personal elements this I'll get to in a second. But our book, our 2014 book, was on Scaling Up Excellence. And then we hang out with folks like Chris Yeh of Blitzscaling fame and venture capitalists like Ravi here. Their dream is scale, baby, scale. Let's make a unicorn. And there are various organizations. I've been in the Stanford engineering school for 40 years. I've seen a lot of startups come and go. I won't mention Google, but let's take Facebook, which actually, I worked with them when they had between 200 and 400 people. I wasn't of much help, but I had a lot of fun. And now they're like, kind of a big dumb company in a lot of ways. And so what happens in the process, since we're interested in scaling, is that as organizations get large and complex, it's very hard for them to create places where it's still easy to get things done. And yes, we're not like this is really important because there's some people who say, kill the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy must die. That's not us. Our perspective. There's a great book called hack your bureaucracy. I think that's all our perspective that as organizations get larger, more complex and older, they do need more process, they do need more specialization. They really do need. They need hierarchy. But some are better than others. So that's sort of the personal part, is that leading at scale was something that a lot of organizations, in my case, you did more stuff with Salesforce and I did more stuff with Microsoft. Those are examples of organizations where leading at scale is important. Leading something big. And then let's get personal. Since we're at Stanford University, since I have been here 40 years, things are so much harder to get done here than when I got here. It's just absolutely unbelievable. And one of the things that makes it harder, and I think many of you have probably seen the numbers at Stanford. We have. It depends how you calculate about the same number of administrators as we do of students. It depends how you count. And of course, administrators have to justify their existence. So what they do is they create things for us, the students and faculty, to do and for one another to do to justify their existence and to just give you, like, kind of a little number. When I first got to the school of engineering, which now has about 20% more tenure track faculty than it did in 1983, there was only one person in the whole school named Ken down, who was a finance person or a money person. Now, to survive the bureaucracy, everybody needs multiple money finance people just to fight back, just to get stuff done. And so they create work for one another and for us. I'm not saying that there's too many of them. I'm saying it's a symptom.