Author Interview with Robert Sutton for Scaling Up Excellence

Hi, everybody. I'm Peg Fitzpatrick, and we have an author interview today with Robert Sutton. And Guy Kawasaki will be joining me. I will start with a quick intro of Robert. Robert is a Stanford professor. He's the author of seven books, including Scaling Up Excellence, which we're going to talk about today. And I'm also joined by Guy Kawasaki, who is the author of 12 books. He is a social media. What should we call you today? Goliath? I'm going to make up a new term every time. Venture capitalist and a startup advisor. So he will be giving us the meat of the questions for Robert today because this is an area which Guy will be much more comfortable than I will. So I'll be asking the starter beginner person questions and Guy will be getting us the hard balls.

All right, you do the easy ones first, Peggy. Or you want me to start in on him?

And just like Nick, well, how nice are we going to be to Bob? Is this going to be one of the ones where we make someone cry? Are we just going to make them?

I don't know. My son knows his daughter, so making.

Me cry is good.

Okay, we'll work on that. Well, maybe we should have Robert start with an overview of the book and then we could do questions.

Well, how about we have Robert explain his background?

Okay, well, that's my background from childbirth or just my professional background.

You can skip both of them.

So, real briefly, I'm an academic. My background's in organizational psychology, and I've been at Stanford 30 years. And I spent the first 15 years being a serious academic, writing articles that nobody read but were very serious and very rigorous. Over the last 15 years, I've drifted. Some of my colleagues would say sold out to doing stuff that's more practical. I've actually been having a lot of fun in recent years writing stuff that I hope have some impact on organizations and hope make things a little better for folks. I hope that's happening. But I have to say that when you write a book about scaling excellence or even workplace jerks or assholes, that the conversations you have with people are much more interesting than talking to my colleagues about obscure statistical issues. So that's sort of the arc of my professional life.

So can we just backtrack because you and I became friends with the asshole book.

Yes, we did. We bonded.

I know I don't want everybody to think you're the asshole guy, but at least explain the premise of that book.

Well, so the premise of this very deep book is that there's sort of a lesson which is this book took less time to write than any book I've ever written and it sold the most. But anyways, the lesson of this book is that workplaces should not hire assholes and not allow them to get away with being assholes. And if they keep being assholes, they should take money away from them or discipline them. And if that doesn't work, they should fire them. I think that's almost the whole book. There's many nuances, like the chapter on the virtues of assholes that features Steve Jobs and stuff like that. But that's the basic story. And on that book, part of what Guy is talking about is right before the book came out, actually several months, there was a test in it that was a self test to see if you were an asshole. And Guy looked at it and he said, good test, bad name. He named it the Arse, the Asshole Rating Self Exam. And right now, if your listeners can look it up. But the number of people who fill out that arsenal and the number of US sales have always been within 10 or 15,000 of one another. It's almost perfect. And so Guy had a big effect on my life. And my first bestseller was because I think Guy figured out how to market.

The Arse, but he wasn't good at marketing.

Didn't we make it so that everybody failed the ars test? So that everybody had to buy the book?

Well, not everybody didn't fail it. I got a lot of. But there's a number from 1 to 24. And I have people who meet me for the first time. They don't say hello. They say, I'm a two. I'm only a two. I'm really good. Like, no further explanation. So a two is really low. That means you're probably too low because everybody needs a little asshole in them. So anyways.

Otherwise they're all puckered up.

They're all puckered up. They get pushed around too much. Don't get me laughing, please.

Okay, so give us the overall gist of this new book, Scaling Up.

This is a little different sort of book. So this is a book that my colleague Huggy Rao and I, we worked on seven years.

Seven years.

Seven years. Yeah. I mean, it was quite a labor. And what we're interested in to switch gears and this is important for entrepreneurs and for people also in larger organizations is situations where there's a little bit of goodness. So a pocket that's innovative, a pocket that's efficient. And how do you spread that from those who have it to those who don't to Give you kind of like a range of cases. One organization we talked about is Pulse, just a little startup that got sold to LinkedIn recently as they grew from 2 to 4 to 7 to 30. That was a scaling example. We looked at Facebook. We actually done a lot of interviews and had contact with Facebook from the time they had maybe 50 or 60 people to the giant thing they are now. And then other examples. One example I like Procter and Gamble. There's a woman, one of our scaling heroes, named Claudia Kotchka. She led an effort to spread innovation practices from just a little group to all around the company and actually did a lot of good for their products. And basically the book has various mantras, but if I was going to pick one and we can start talking 1. One of the main things that we learned in companies that scale well is they don't run around in a frenzy. They actually slow, are really good at knowing when to slow down now so they can speed up later. But it's been an interesting adventure and we're having a lot of fun with this book. I'm going to Pixar later today, so that should be fun.

So usually does the good drive out the bad or the bad drive out the good?

So one of our other sort of mantras, and this is very important for spreading excellence, now we're using the term bad to great. So if you look at situations where excellence spreads, the first order of business is to get rid of bad behavior. It can be big bad behavior, like corruption. Corruption is very contagious. I mean, you look at the Sochi Olympics, it's one of the problems, but it's even little bits of bad behavior. And I'll give you a good example. One of the scaling stars in our book is Chris Fry. Chris is head of engineering at Twitter. And before that, he built the development organization on salesforce.com, really charming guy. He's actually somebody you would like guy. And so when he first got to Twitter, he goes to a meeting, there's like a bunch of engineers, and they're not looking at them, they're looking at their cell phones, right? Because that's what they do at Twitter. And so now he collects them in a basket and makes them talk to one another. And to me, that's a good example of how a skilled person does to sort of get away the bad so that the good can spread. And we see that in larger ways in terms of getting rid of people who are in the way things like procedures that cause friction. But that's that general view that my job isn't just to add, it's to subtract bad things as a hallmark of leaders and organizations that scale well.

So to take an extreme example, let's say that you, you buy this book, you read this book and you're inside Goldman Sachs. Yeah. What would you do if you're not a partner? What would you do besides quit?

Well, thanks for bringing up Goldman Sachs so I can alienate the entire financial services industry who now won't buy this book. Right. But I do think that in organizations like Goldman Sachs, I mean the first thing as a former lawyer, you know, some of this you got to look and see what behavior you're actually rewarding as opposed to what you spew the bullshit about. And Goldman Sachs actually is pretty good about having good compliance officers and the like. But you've really got to look at who you're actually rewarding in promoting because in organizations that actually. So we're talking about ethics as opposed to money and maybe selflessness instead of selfishness. But you've got to look at the kind of behavior you reward. Now Goldman Sachs is actually interesting because for themselves they've always been a quite well ran firm in that people who get ahead at Goldman Sachs compared to say Merrill lynch in the old days, they get ahead by actually helping others succeed. And others get ahead. They may do stuff that we don't like, but the best organizations will essentially not reward or glorify people who are superstars, but who stomp on others as they get ahead. As for fixing Goldman Sachs, I don't know enough about them. I think they're very good at managing themselves, but I don't know that. I'm not kidding. They're historically very good at taking care of themselves. Well, we know that, but within the firm they're actually not overly selfish. The question of whether or not they should have that much power and should have. What is it? They're. They're funnel sucking every bit of money they could possibly have. I think that's a broader issue and one in some ways I prefer to stay away from. I've already got enough enemies. I will say there are financial services firms that have a much higher proportion of assholes than Goldman Sachs. Most people, Goldman Sachs are pretty civilized.

Well, that's the quote of the day. I feel much better now they have.

A lower percentage of assholes than other financial firms. They do. They're actually. And plus they bought some copies of my book, so they must be fine people. So that's the other thing I should talk About.

So you can rent Bob Sutton? Is that what you're saying?

I guess you can. Well, I don't think I would do a tobacco company, for example, or you know, but I guess they did rent me. So yeah, you can rent me.

How about an E cigarette company then?

Now that's interesting. I probably would not do E cigarettes, but I like how you're looking for my moral boundaries and companies. I don't know where it begins and ends. Anyway.

Okay, so believe it or not, this is a very deep question. You're going to have to explain the context of what all these terms mean. Okay.

Okay. So this is like the lightning round or something?

Yeah. This is a question that unless you've read the book, you really don't understand the totality of the depth of my insight into your book. So you're going to have to bring everybody up to speed. Okay?

Yes, boss, I'm ready.

So the question is, is the current Pope Catholic?

Oh, that is a great line. Okay, so what Guy's talking about? That is a great line.

Thank you.

So the answer is yes, but he's getting a little Buddhist, but let's unpack it. So the main concepts in the book, and this was actually invented by my friend who's a venture capitalist and also teaches at Stanford named Michael Deering. So what happened was in the early days of the design school, which is an institute at Stanford that spreads design thinking across the campus and hopefully the world in the early days, we're sitting around 2006, we're in a double wide trailer and we're talking about taking over the world. And Michael says, and by the way, both Guy and I, our kids go to a Catholic school and Michael, Dearie's mother teaches at our kids school. So there's a lot of Catholicism here. Anyways, so Michael says, so are we going to be Catholics? So he knows Catholics, he's altar boy of the month many times where we kind of have produced the mass in Rome and then replicated everywhere throughout the world. Or we can be Buddhists where essentially design thinking has sort of a concept or a mindset, but there's different variations. And basically the this distinction is do you insist on standardization and replication or do you allow and encourage people to do local variation? It's rigidity versus flexibility. And the natural thing for all of us is, oh, Buddhism, flexibility is good. But there's a lot of times you look at In N Out Burger, you look at Intel Success, See's Candies McKinsey, the consulting firm where rigidity or at Least standardization is quite good. But the issue is always to what extent do we lean towards standardization or towards more flexibility? So this brings us back to the Pope. And the Pope, one of the things that is quite fascinating to me is he's kind of creating a larger tent. He's having more flexibility that a wider range of, let's say, interpersonal behavior, like people who are gay or have sinned in other ways. He's kind of opening up the tent. And. And so what I think has happened is that the Catholic Church has gone a little strategically, they forget the moralities. Although somebody will probably go crazy and say, I don't understand the Catholic Church. This is an analogy that he's sort of tilted in the direction of moving towards a little bit more Buddhism and opening up the tent. I mean, just as an example. And I'll see if I get in trouble with this. Before he came on board, my wife is an executive at the Girl Scouts. The Catholic Church was investigating the Girl Scouts. They've kind of stopped because. And I don't know why they'd investigate the Girl Scouts. They need more investigation than the Girl Scouts do. But this idea of sort of accepting a wider range of behavior and being more flexible. So, yeah, I think the new puppet is a little bit more Buddhist than the last guy.

Okay, so is today's Apple. Is today's Apple Buddhist or Catholic?

Oh, man. I think Apple's always been pretty Catholic, actually. I mean, especially. So one of the things that we say is to move away from the Buddhist, Catholic language, as much as we love it, to what extent you have to figure out, have some things that are standardized, that are sacred. And that's one of the things we say that in organizations that are well ran, they know what's sacred and they know what's taboo. And as a former Apple employee, I bet you know how sacred secrecy is at Apple. I mean, I got this buddy, Joel Podolni, who is head of hr, and Joel and I like. Joel's one of the best managers I ever met. Like, he was completely open. He went into Apple. It's like he's in a witness protection program. It's unbelievable. And I saw him once, and he only said one thing to me, which was actually sort of interesting. But other than that, I can't get anything out of them. And we know that that's one of the great things about Apple and other things about Apple, that there's a few sort of sacred guardrails. The other one, which I think that Steve did bring back there, you were not there during the glory years, as we know, guys, is that he really brought back this notion that whatever you're doing, you're supposed to have pride in what you're doing to make it as good as you possibly can. So I'm going to Pixar later. That's another sort of guardrail to me. But I think that Apple is a pretty Catholic organization and they don't do, for example, they don't do much local modification in the way an Apple store looks or in products for countries. They do as little as they possibly can. And in contrast, since I know that you've got a Motorola phone or some giant Android phone I just saw a few minutes ago, now that's a Catholic approach. It's like, here's sort of like our operating system. Do with it what you will. Right, you mean Buddhists, Right, Buddhist. Sorry, thank you. I don't even know my own terminology. Thank you.

Yes, Buddhist. Okay, okay. So clearly Buddhism and Catholicism can both work in business. Or is there a.

Well, the way that I think about it is if you think about standardization versus allowing customization, you're always leaning one way or another. But since I know a lot of your folks are interested in startups, for startups, it's probably easier to start more standardized and then to sort of adjust as you go along. So I'll give you a good example. Starbucks. When Howard Schultz started what eventually became the first Starbucks, what he did was he brought in basically an Italian coffee bar in complete form in Seattle. I mean with the stand up bar, no seats, and he had the opera music blaring and everything. And then he looked to see what didn't work. So he gave them seats because they wanted to sit down. He put in sort of easy listening rock music. But he started with a relatively pure template and then sort of backed off on it in that general approach of starting relatively pure, but then as little parts don't work. It's also what IKEA did when they went into China. When IKEA went into China, they started with sort of the standard store, but then they realized, well, for this culture we've got to have delivery and assembly. Because in the Chinese culture people don't have big cars or they don't have a car at all. And they're definitely not into assembly. It's a do it for me culture. But they still had the original IKEA template. I think that's important for entrepreneurs in particular is to pick something and see how far you can push it and then adjust it as it needs to be. Broadened for different markets.

I'll give you a mantra, Bob, that you can use.

Please, I need all the help I can get.

Okay, so you could tell people that they should think Buddhist but act Catholic.

Oh, I like that. I like that. That'll do.

Are we going to get a quiz where people can sort of rate their organization about whether there's potential for scaling up? How can people tell?

How can people tell? Well, I have not been able to bring myself to come up with the easy 15 item checklist of things that you can do. I mean, I think in this book I think we have more principles because frankly the asshole book was a one idea book, maybe one and a half ideas, this is a more complicated book. But there are certain things that we see three or four things that are the hallmarks of good scaling and I think we've talked about some of them. One of the classic hallmarks you already said is bad is stronger than good. So you've got to get rid of the bad. Another thing that I think is really important, and we've also talked about this a little bit, is there's this ability that people have to think about how what they're doing now is going to scale up later. So they're sort of on the path. A good example, one of the cases in our book is called Bridge International Academies, sort of a low cost chain school in Africa. So you pay $5 a month to have your very poor child go to this school. It's like 12 hours a day. So it's a for profit set of schools. And it started by actually some Silicon Valley folks, Vinod Kolsoft funded actually in part. But when they set up the very first school in Africa, what they did, they only had one school. And Shannon May, who's one of the co founders, she told us we wouldn't do anything in unless it would work with 25 schools. And so that notion of how far we're going to go and that you're always thinking of linking the ever present now to the future and to switch gears completely to Google. Since we're on a Google hangout, one of the people we interviewed for the book was Shona Brown. Shona was number four at Google and led business operations there as they grew from 2,000 to 30,000. And Shona said that we always had the mindset going back to Larry's earliest day that who we hired we would not just look at them for the role they can do now, but how could they grow into the role further. So this idea of thinking about the Relationship between what people are doing now and how we want to grow is the hallmark, I think, of organizations that scale well. But in terms of giving you a checklist, if you want actually your readers can look it up or the people are watching this. Just today at Harvard Business Review, we posted a list of eight scaling essentials. So I guess we have sort of a checklist. But I haven't been able to do the 25 item quiz yet because it doesn't seem like that simple of a problem. Asshole is pretty simple actually, compared to this.

I'll do it for you, Bob.

Go for it, guy.

Since you obviously can't scale as an author, I'll do it for you.

Well, you've saved my ass before, guy, so maybe.

Okay, so another scenario. Let's suppose that I'm a job candidate interviewing at this company and I want to know that this company can scale. So what am I looking for?

What are you looking for? Well, two or three things that I would especially emphasize. The first one is just pure and you know this just pure commitment in the notion that the way we put it is, do they see what they're doing as fighting an air war or a ground war? And this is something we saw over and over again. This general notion is, are they sort of fighting the individual battles and slowing down to do what it takes to really set the stage for growth? So Facebook's a good example. So since we hung out with them a lot, especially in the earlier days, two things that they did in the very, very early days, which nobody seems to remember, there was a point where there was seven or eight other Mark Zuckerbergs at other schools. They fought ground wars to win those schools. And then also in terms of the organization, and this is very important for startups is in terms of the hiring process, we already talked about Google. Are they sort of slowing down to make sure and bring the right people aboard and to brainwash them properly? Facebook has an amazing brainwashing operation. They spend six weeks basically brainwashing you in the move fast and break things mindset before they let you figure out which job you're going to be in. So that idea of slowing down to go fast later, and the second thing for startups, and then maybe we can sort of move on. And also larger organizations, which is essentially, and I'll sort of just use a great saying from Chris Fry, who's head of engineering at Twitter, I already mentioned him. His view is how do they use the hierarchy? Do they use it to create a crappy bureaucracy? That's full of mud and is just impossible to get through? Or are they such wimps that even though the organization is growing, they aren't putting any structure or process or any rules in? So essentially, are they using the hierarchy to create a functional bureaucracy or is there no process at all? Because we've all seen startups where it's like, wow, man, there's 50 of us, we're running out of control. Or are they putting in so much bureaucracy they bring in the big company idiots, and then you've got this incredibly complicated hiring process. You got to fill out forms for days and you can't ever actually get somebody aboard. So I guess that slowing down to move faster later on, and this idea of having people actually understand how to do the balancing act between having too little versus too much, sort of just bureaucracy, process, hierarchy, what you need. And those are the things I guess I would look for.

Okay, and in all this discussion of what to look for, what to avoid, what to change, does this change when we're talking about a not for profit versus a profit company?

Well, it's interesting because as I say, my wife is CEO of a nonprofit, the Girl Scouts. It actually doesn't really change that much because although it might be more of a value basis, and it's actually an advantage you often have in a nonprofit, is that the reason that people work for nonprofits is more for a value based that notion of I own the place and the place owns me. And there's more emotional commitment that happens more independent of the money. But my answer to that is no. Because if you look at hospitals, we looked at a lot of hospitals. You look at something like the Girl Scouts. I say my wife works in the process of spreading something good from one place to another. In some ways comes down to the same process. We call this process connect and cascade. So you create a little pocket of excellence, and then what you do is once you get that humming, you spread it to the next place, the next place, the next place. I was actually just on the phone just before I got here with some folks who are trying to do reforms in community college. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to make it so the community colleges train people who are more well prepared for the current workforce. So people like Peggy, who actually know how to use the machine we're using, and it's amazing to watch her set it up, it's like, oh, you actually know how to use this thing. But what they do is they find or create little pockets of excellence in the community college. And once they get them humming, then they'll infect another school or another part of the community college. So that idea of, rather than spreading a thin coat of sort of knowledge, creating true excellence and then spreading it, that happens whether you're talking about saving lives in hospitals, whether you're spreading sales techniques at Xerox or in this case, community colleges or the Girl Scouts. So I actually think that the process is pretty similar across. Although in a big capitalist organization, you can use more financial incentives, but there's other ways to get human beings going too.

Peggy, do you have questions for Bob? I've been kind of dominating the conversation here.

Well, I do, but we went through most of mine because mine were like the beginning starter ones, and we kind of skipped past those. So I'm going to ask about the problem of more. Can you define the problem of more?

So where this came is in the very kind of early days of working on the book, we're trying to figure out what we were doing. I guess we should have started with you, right, Peggy? So, like, what's the main problem we're studying? And the thing that we started realizing was, well, first of all, people kept coming to us and they kept saying, we've got a little bit of goodness. How do I spread it further without screwing it up? And to us, that's basically the problem of more. You've got something good, and how do you spread it to more people, more places, without screwing it up? Another way to put it, Pete Seeger, the late folksinger, just died a couple of weeks ago. He talks about situation. He had this expression, which is that sometimes in life, the main problem with something is there isn't enough of it. So for us, that's the problem of more is how you get it to more places without screwing it up. As we've all seen with many organizations that grow and grow too quickly or grow dumbly, that it's hard to scale up without screwing up. A lot of organizations have been ruined in the process. Groupon is a great example. God, they just screwed that thing up so much, it's unbelievable.

So how do you get past when you're in the problem of more and you have it, how do you get past that inevitable, the 80. 20%, where 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. How do you get past that on the scaling?

My perspective on the way that you get past that. We're moving further on to the book. When we see organizations that. That overcome that problem, there's this sense of ownership or Mutual obligation that people feel like I own the place and the place owns me. And yes, that does happen in a lot of organizations. And this is a weird thing to switch gears to. But if you look at situations where people tend to spread and sustain excellence above their competitors, what they tend to do is there's this real sense, it's almost like you can't get away with anything because everybody's putting so much pressure on everybody else. One of the things we did was we looked at a study of hospitals that are really good. This is an unfortunate situation, but it happens all the time. Somebody probably has a head injury and they're a good candidate for organ donation. What's the difference between hospitals where most eligible donors donate versus a much lower percentage in those hospitals? There's this sense of mutual obligation where everybody pressures everybody else to make sure that things are done in the right way. They have constant sort of stand up huddles. Where's the family at? What can we do to help? And they don't just have doctors and nurses, they have the clergy, they have the receptionists. They pull in family members who have been through this horrible situation before in that sense of everybody pressuring everybody else. And at least in the organizations where I've been to talk about more mundane situations where everybody feels obligated to press everybody else. I, I'll give you an example since I'm going to Pixar this afternoon. One of the great things I've noticed about Pixar over the years is everybody takes such pride in doing the right job. And at least the last time I was there, about a year and a half ago, if you talk to the security guards and the receptionists, they would take such pride in what they were doing and if things weren't going well, they would worry about it themselves. And that sense that everybody is sort of responsibility responsible for making things happen as well as they can. And that's a difficult thing to achieve. And some organizations do it better than others. It's funny you mentioned Goldman Sachs. I hate to say it. Did they say anything positive about them? But historically I think they've been fantastic at creating a culture where people put on pressure to do what they believe is the right thing.

That's like seeing Jim Jones put on fantastic pressure.

While there's a difference between ends and means, he did put in fantastic pressure. And that's the hallmark when people really have that tight social bonds they can do the best and the worst things. So you have to talk about goodness when it's saving lives. It's fabulous. And when it's selling, I don't know if it's selling hot dogs or Coca Cola. Okay, so it's neutral. Probably people would go after that. But there's a difference between ends and means. But when you see functional organizations, there are tight social bonds. This is why we talk about sacred and profane so much. When it comes to spreading excellence, people have a real clear sense of what's sacred and profane and they hold people responsible for it. To give you two extreme examples, we talked about Apple in the sacred secrecy or scared secret. They sometimes say another organization, we spend a lot of time talking with folks. John Lilly, who was the CEO, we're actually doing something with them later in the week is Mozilla, which brings us the Firefox browser, which is an open source browser. In that case, secrecy is viewed as taboo. So you just have to have real clear guidelines about what's good and what's bad. But to your point, Guy, yes, the best and worst things done by humanity have been done by people who have a real sense of mutual obligation to one another.

But I've seen it seems to me there's a huge change in the way companies are run now with startups. I actually started my career with Merrill Lynch. Oh, sorry, you can slap me. That's okay. Back in the day, back in the day when you had to wear skirts because that's how old. Now everybody knows how old I am. But companies were run differently then. It was a much more structured hierarchy. And the startups now all seem to have this mentality which would push this scaling. I don't know where the question is in that, but do you see a bigger movement towards that, towards companies that have this mentality like Facebook, where you're part of a team?

But the question, I mean, at least one of the questions I hear in there is that our organizations basically being less hierarchical now. And the answer to that to me is no and yes, because it's no in that. And I got a lot of grief for writing a LinkedIn post where I basically said hierarchy is good. Hierarchy is essential. There still has to be a pecking order in life. I'm really sorry. It's impossible to have even a group of three dogs without having a pecking order. It just doesn't work. But the fact is that in the best organizations you have as little hierarchy as you possibly can and you have as much. It's basically informal social control where you're not just fooling the boss, you kind of got to fool everybody else. On your team because there's that sense of mutual obligation. Zappos is actually a good example. They're going this thing called the Holocracy to really sort of focus on this. But nonetheless, they still got people who can fire people who do performance evaluations. There's still some of that, but the best organizations have as little of that as possible. But you still need some hierarchy.

Evernote, for example, has an open vacation policy, so you can have as many vacation days as you want. And they say nobody takes advantage of that.

Well, yeah, in the old days, you.

Had 20 vacation days, and then you would earn four more vacation days. And now it's this. Of course, I have unlimited vacation days because I bring my computer everywhere, so I'm always working. It's this little thing I invented. But it's interesting how that kind of corporate. They're giving people the things that they can make the decisions on themselves to the people.

The goal is to just get rid of, to me, is to get rid of the friction and to give people as much responsibility as possible, but at the same time holding them responsible for performance. One of my, I think the most interesting cases in the book in terms of this idea of as you scale, subtracting sources of friction as much as possible, is Adobe. Donna Morris, the head of hr, actually got rid of traditional performance evaluations because it was the source of friction. It took all these extra hours and everything and basically changed things where she made it so that the managers actually have to talk to their employees as opposed to the yearly weird conversation with the form. And that was a case where you're sort of removing the stuff that's a source of friction. But at Evernote, it's the same thing that you actually have to have an understanding of the business and relationship with your boss and your team, so that it's actually more difficult than just following the rule. You actually got to improvise some. And that's why to go back in startups and other organizations that do the best of sort of instilling the mindset that is most effective for them, the better people understand how we're supposed to behave here and what it takes for our firm to be effective or our nonprofit to be effective, the less you have to have a bazillion rules and monitor them closely. But you still need a little hierarchy.

Bob, how does your book apply to the military?

We have a lot of military examples, actually. You can pick anywhere. But I'll give you. We have two military examples that I love, and this is one of the Hallmarks. Speaking of scaling, is that scaling again, we talk about being the problem of more. The problem of more is at its worst when it comes probably to group size. There's great research that shows you have a group of four or five people. You think a McKinsey consulting team is four. Those of you who are involved in XP or agile teams are five. But as they get bigger, lots of evidence that you basically spend more time fighting and coordinating and less time getting anything done. So you and Peg might be the opposite. The optimal team of two or three or something like that.

We are the optimal team, it's true.

But two is a good number because.

It'S a great number. We argue enough with just two of us. Or I should say we debate. We debate the important issues.

You have to debate the important issues. That's what great teams do. When two people always agree one of them is unnecessary.

What, it's lonely at the top.

It's lonely at the top.

We disagree on some stuff and then we agree on almost everything.

But it's good to fight. So anyway, the military example is at the beginning of World War II, for some reason the Marines decided that they should have 12 person combat teams. And so they put out these 12 person combat teams. And there was all these problems with, well, too many people getting killed with coordination problems, with morale problems. And they broke them into four person fighting teams, which is now actually the standard almost all over the world. Certainly in the US military, when you're actually in combat, you have the one commander and the three folks. And that's the same way that a McKinsey consulting team works. So that's one sort of thing we see in the military is team size. And to switch completely. We have lots of military examples. We have like something in the Korean War too. I won't go into one of our favorite examples of. So the way that excellence tends to happen is when it really happens. You have a little group or a little pocket of excellence and then you find some way to spread it. I already said that. So there was this cool thing that happened in Iraq. It wasn't so cool if you were there, I guess, where the enemy was throwing these RK3 hand grenades, actually old Russian hand grenades. And usually they'd blow up, but some guys sort of noticed that when they hit something soft, they'd bounce off. So one group, they mounted trampolines on the side of a truck and then bounced off. But the cool part. So, okay, so it's one little pocket of excellence, but there's something called the army center for Lessons Learned. And they spread the news that pretty soon there was trucks all over Iraq with these. You can see the pictures somewhere with these trampolines on the side of them. To us, that's an idea. That's an example of connecting and cascading excellence. And so maybe either we're being imperialistic or we've come up with a general perspective so your readers and stuff and everybody else will have to decide. But our perspective is that what it for, what it takes to sustain and to spread goodness, it's pretty similar across different sorts of organizations if you look at the basic principles.

Okay, so is the book for sale now? Is it out?

Oh, yeah, you can buy it. Buy as many as you want. It's everywhere. Yes, it's even in airports. But yeah, it's been on Amazon. Let's see, it's been out for six days. So February 4th was the launch date. So we're six days in.

Well, we'll be sure to pimp it as much as we can.

Keep pimping, guy. That's what you're good at.

We like to do that.

That was a compliment, right?

Of course. I believe in sales. Did you see Dan Pink's book To Sell as Human? That's like one of my favorite books. It's a dignified activity.

Got to do it. If you want a key, you got to sell. So everybody's selling something.

Okay, so how about you give us one last tip so that people will say, okay, so I learned this thing and I'm going to go implement it right now.

Okay, so if I was going to do one tip, and this is something that we've actually done with a lot of organizations lately, is start looking around at the stuff that you do that is actually dumb and is slowing things down. We call this a subtraction game. We've done it. So start playing the subtraction game. What have you done that you've always done that gets you in trouble? So performance evaluations or another thing, Especially if you've been growing. What used to be great but now actually completely sucks, but you can't stop doing it. An example of this that we looked at was at ideo, one of my favorite organizations. The Monday morning meeting all hands meeting was great with David Kelly, the CEO, and they had 60 was 150. It was a complete nightmare. So we call this a subtraction game, which is what are those sources of mud that are getting in the way? We even did this. We actually did something with the Stanford development office. These are the people who raise money try to raise money from alums like Guy so faculty like me can be paid more. Thank you, Guy. But they actually figured out they had two parallel processes that they had going on, and they basically had to fill out the same forms twice. And these are quite senior people. And they said, well, why don't we get rid of one? The rumor is they actually got rid of it, which is amazing when an organization gets rid of some source of friction. But to me, the stuff that makes it feel like you're in muck or is slowing you down, and we all have that in our lives because we get into habits and there's incentives. But look for the crap you can get rid of, so if you will, the excellence can spread.

Just applying that off the top of my head, that test. Yes, I'm not going to answer email anymore.

You wish.

Or at least answer them once every couple of weeks is the other thing. You'll lose a lot of things. So anyway, when we did the subtraction game with a group of COOs, and what one Guy did, and this is pretty expensive, is every time he sent out an email, he said he was going to donate a dollar to charity. And every time he did one of those things where he cc'd a bunch of people, it was going to be $2. So I thought that's sort of like a little bit of self control to make you think that would cost me about $5,000 a day. So I'm not going to do it to myself.

That's horrible.

That's very interesting. It's kind of a segue, but every once in a while, and I don't want to sound macabre, but I'm 59 years old, so some of my friends are literally dying at this point.

I'm the same age you are.

Actually, what I've done is whenever a friend of mine dies, I take my email inbox and I throw everything away in that person's honor. Because what I noticed is that you throw away your inbox, you spend more time with your family and it doesn't matter. I've never had someone say, you didn't answer my very important email. Why didn't you get back to me? Never. I've thrown away hundreds of emails. That's my subtractive theory on steroids. Empty your email inbox because it does not matter. Nobody ever contacts you again.

They'll track you down anyhow. Right?

Exactly.

All the people who didn't get an answer from Guy. Now you know why you were deleted.

My Friends are dying.

That's sad Guy. Okay, so Robert, can you tell us who's the ideal? I'm going to get back on track here. Who the ideal candidate is to read your book. Like who is your target audience? Who will gain the most from reading Stanley?

Well, we think of our ideal.

Don't say everyone. You can't say everyone.

I would say anybody with 20 bucks.

Anybody with 20 bucks. Anybody with twenty bucks. But I would also say because it's funny because I've been talking to different people, which is like, why would you buy this or not buy it? It's anybody who is in a group where their goal is to spread something good a little further. So it actually could be adding a couple people to your group or it could be scaling up a large organization. It does have some individual how do I help my career parts for people who are more entrepreneurial and more leadership. But to me, this notion of it is a core leadership skill and a core team member skill to know how to spread something good further. If you're in that situation, if you're a doctor or nurse and you want to spread life saving practices further, or if you run a small sales team and you got three people are good and three people suck, to me they're similar sort of problems. But it's not like an individual self help book that's going to make me feel better about myself and feel happier every day. Although I did like Guy's application of the subtraction game to his calendar. But that way he can spend more time with his friends and family and people he actually cares about as opposed to answering all those damn emails. So he is clearing the way for excellence at an individual level.

Honestly, the day I die, I don't think I'm going to say, man, shit, I should have answered more emails.

Me neither. Maybe we should end with that. That's pretty damn good.

Thank you, mom.

Thanks a lot, Guy. Thanks a lot, Peg. It was really fun.

Thank you. Guess we're all set. We'll tune out. Thank you.

Bye. Thanks.