Bob Sutton: Mastering Organizational Friction for Better Leadership

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Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is the remarkable Bob Sutton. Bob is an organizational psychologist and best selling author. He's known for his work on leadership, innovation and workplace dynamics. He and I go back a long way and we are both students in the science of assholes. Not in the medical sense, more in the behavior sense. He's even written a book on the subject called the no Asshole Rule. Bob was a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford from 1983 to 2023. He is currently a professor emeritus there. His current book, the Friction Project, How Smart Leaders make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder is a must read. Today we are going to discuss good friction and bad friction and assholes. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Bob Sutton. We gotta go backwards in time a little bit. We gotta catch up. So explain how many took the arse test. The Asshole test.

The Rating Self exam is a test that. Actually it's in my best selling book, the no Rule. It was not called the Rating Self Exam. It's also a test that my wife wrote, not me. Usually I write everything. My wife doesn't even read my stuff. But she was running a large law firm at this time. Aren't you a lawyer? Weren't you ever a lawyer?

I was a law student for two weeks.

She was running a big.

Most people take 20 years to figure out they hate law. I did it in two weeks. That's how smart I am.

You are. She was running a law firm with about a thousand lawyers. And I said, my editor wants a test. You got any ideas? And she just thought of all the behaviors of all the lawyers who she was dealing with. She wrote in about 10 minutes and it was in the book. But you read the book and you said, let's call this the Asshole Rating Self exam. And the rest is history. And I looked it up. People can still find the ARS test. Guy Kawasaki and 613,000 people had completed it last time I looked, which was in 2023. Thanks, Guy. Beautiful PR. You are a genius. And I'm not sure that book would have been a bestseller without you. I had a little helpful at just the right time.

Thank you for all the royalty you've been sending me over the.

Yeah, yeah, you're welcome.

It helped me pay for the Sacred Heart tuition.

I had to pay some Sacred Heart tuition too. Ouch.

I'm so glad my kids went to Cal State schools. I started saving money when they graduated high school. Have you any ever done any statistical analysis and figured out what the mean and average score of the ARS test was?

Or they just said it's not a scientific test. You mean lectures polling? Yeah, it's probably worse than electric polling, to be honest. But the mean is about 8. So that means that you're occasionally an asshole. But. But who knows what the mean uses because. Because a lot of times, even though it's a self exam, people will fill it out with their boss in mind. So I do that sometimes. There was a point where to tell tales out of school that I had a chair at Stanford who I thought was a certified asshole and I just completed the arse to see how he got like a 12 out of 24, which is pretty high actually, in my biased opinion. So it can be used for other purposes.

With your current view of the world, do you think assholeness is on the rise or decline?

So there's two views of this and I. One is that there's just a certain percentage of us who are assholes no matter what. And that's what we call those certified assholes. Or I guess I call those certified assholes, you know, to use the name Donald Trump, I think pretty consistently across times and people. He treats people like shit, he really does. So I would say he's a certified asshole. And I wasn't so sure about Elon Musk, but he seems to be in the category too. But then there's people who. Psychologists are fantastic at turning people into assholes. You just put them in a hurry, you have them be sleep deprived. Being around assholes is one of the best way to act like an asshole. I mean, perfectly normal people, they work with a bunch of assholes. It's like they pick up the vibe, it's contagious. But my rough sense is that because of the Internet and because of the hurry sickness that we have. And also another thing that does turn people nasty is when there's inequality, and especially when inequality is obvious. I give you an interesting example. One of my colleagues, Katie Deselles, who I do research with, she's a psychologist, she studied air rage and she found out sometimes when you get in the plane, if you turn left, you go to first class and if you turn right, you go to coach. But other times you have to walk through first class. She found out in the plains where you have to walk through first class, there's more likely to be air rage by both people in first class and in coach because the inequality is made more obvious. She had a Huge data set. So anything associated with inequality, it actually brings out the worst in both the powerful and the powerless, because the powerless kick down and the powerless kick up. So you end up with revolution in domination. So my hunch is things might be getting a little bit worse. But for Time in Memoriam, there's always been a certain percentage of us who are certified assholes, and all of us can be temporary assholes under the wrong conditions.

Do you think that being a certified mission driven asshole is okay? I'm referring specifically to Steve Jobs.

So let's talk. You worked for Steve Jobs and I did not. Especially in my second asshole book. Who knows, I should have written it. The Asshole Survival Guide. I actually did a lot of investigation about whether Steve was an asshole. And here's at least what I came up with. And my main source, this is in the book, was Ed Catmull. So Ed was head of Pixar for 28 years. Met with Steve every week for 27, 28 years. And here's Ed's perspective. So I don't know, believe it or not, but Ed's perspective is that the Steve Jobs who you might have worked with, you worked with him before he was kicked out of the kingdom, right?

Before and after and after.

So Ed's point, and you may disagree, is that that Steve, after he got kicked out of the kingdom and had all the trouble at next, he actually became and went through the darkness or the wilderness, as Ed put it. He became actually a better person and a more humble person. And in particular, coach Bill Campbell, who went for a walk with him every Sunday, helped him, if you will, stifle his demons a little bit. So I don't know that's accurate. And there's also another take on this, which is this is one of the things I've spent way too much time thinking about and getting Silicon Valley gossip and stuff, is that there's also the other problem with the story, and Ed agreed with this, is at Apple, he was more of an asshole than Pixar because Pixar had a less assholey culture. And it was just an investment for him. It wasn't like his life like Apple was like his life. He knew he was the smartest person at Apple. He didn't know he was the smartest person at Pixar. And he had Ed Catmull and people like that. Brad Bird, the great director. So there's different takes on this and the other thing about Steve, which you probably know is Steve would do amazingly support of things for people that were just almost Irrational. He could be very loving and giving backstage. He didn't donate any money to anybody. Lorraine Jobs is doing that now. So there's two takes that maybe he was an asshole who succeeded. And then the other part is the Ed Catmull story that it was the Steve Jobs who became at least less of an asshole who got really, really rich. So I don't know which is true. But those are different stories that I tend to hear. Let's face it, there are people who are assholes who do succeed. We know this.

Maybe Elon Musk will get fired from Tesla and come back a better person.

Elon Musk is not a good person. Maybe he was. Oh, gosh.

Okay, better.

First, a less bad person.

Okay, less bad person. All right, so we covered the background here. Now, I love a good acronym, and I spent a long time coming up with arse.

Right.

Although we chat GPT, we could come up with that in five seconds. So I'm reading your book and I see gross.

Get rid of stupid.

And I saw that. I said, oh, my God, that's better than ours.

No, I think ours is pretty good. Anyway. See, you want me to talk about it or you just want gross? So where gross comes from is that all of us, at least in the United States, and from my understanding, every country in the world now has electronic medical records. And we know we go to the doctor, the nurse practitioner, whatever. They spend the whole time filling out the form and looking at the screen and never looking at us. And this is a worldwide problem. It's actually one of the main sources of stress for physicians and nurses, too. This drives them crazy. So there's a woman named, well, Hawaii. You know something about Hawaii? Aren't you spending some time in Hawaii these days?

Yeah, absolutely.

We just got back from Kauai just two days ago. Beautiful place. What a gorgeous place.

I hope you flew in first class and pissed off all the coach people.

First class on the way there, coach on the way back. The flight attendants were awesome, by the way. I gotta say, I've complained about United, but the flight attendants are awesome.

Yeah, but was it a Boeing plane that should have been passed through quality control?

It was a Boeing plane, actually. A little nervous, actually. A 737 Max. How about that?

Oh, my God.

But we live. So this woman. There's a woman in Hawaii Pacific, which is the largest healthcare system in Hawaii. Her name's Melinda Ashton. And she was upset because they had these electronic medical records and all this stuff that people had to spend all their time sort of staring at the screen. So she had this campaign and she censored it. She said, getting rid of stupid stuff, even though it was really getting rid of stupid shit. And she said, give suggestions to our team. Maybe we can figure out how to simplify the Systems. They got 188 suggestions. They implemented 87. And just one little example, and I think I wrote it. Here it is. So her team eliminated one click that was necessary for patient rounds, at least according to their calculations. Approximately 1700 hours per month were saved at the four hospitals as a result. And our book is about friction fixing and the challenges of friction. And I love that example because our perspective is, no matter where you are in an organization, you can make things better or worse. And she had the power to set up the Getting Rid of stupid stuff campaign, which, by the way, this was published in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title of Gross, a very respectable academic journal. And she used her power to set up the Gross system, Getting rid of stupid stuff system. And then people throughout the hospital, nurses aides, nurses, doctors, were empowered to make suggestions, many of which were implemented. So to me, and this is a lesson from this book, we started writing this book just because we were pissed off about how hard it was to get things done. And all these organizations like Google, Google, used to be so easy to get things done. Now, honestly, Google, it's so much harder to get things done there than General Motors. They have a cash machine, and General Motors has to make one car at a time, which they usually lose money on. So it's much harder to get things done at Google than it is at General Motors right now. It's just turned into this giant hairball of fiefdoms and bureaucracy. It's just a mess. It's nice having a hose that shoots in the money. It is.

I. I gave a talk at Google and I was paid, I don't know, a few thousand bucks, and I've spent weeks trying to get the money. I had to become a vendor, then I had to join SAP, then I had to join all this. And that I still haven't been paid.

And you're still filling out the forms, so. So that's the same expense. Honestly, we're talking about Google and speeches. The other thing that I know about them is there's actually four or five groups that are fighting over who owns the speaking. And so there's four or five warring fiefdoms because. Oh, so this is one of the other things that I like to look out for in Silicon Valley companies. Oh, in My Stanford also suffers from this, by the way, which is spending money is a substitute for thinking. So where this happens, we got so much money and you say, we're going to buy some new software, we're going to start a new position, we're going to start a new group, and pretty soon your organization is filled with groups and software that nobody knows how to use or weave together. So, yes, that sometimes money can be used to reduce friction, but sometimes the more money you have, just the worse it gets because you can buy more stuff and more people and more buildings, and it's like more money, more problems. Who said that? Wasn't that like a rock?

So, you know, I think bad friction is kind of obvious. You already mentioned a great example. But what is good friction.

To your point? When we started the book, it was like anything that's hard to do. The frictionless organization. We want everything to be like, really easy. But then along the way, we figured out that something should be hard. Well, let's start out with one of our many famous Stanford dropouts, Elizabeth Holmes. So she didn't like the fact that the device, the fraudulent device that she developed to put it on US army helicopters, that she needed FDA approval. She was really pissed off. In fact, she got General Mad Dog Mattis to put pressure on the military to have her put it on anyways. And the bureaucrats f back, and even Mattis eventually had to agree that it should have FDA approval. So I think the fact that it was impossible for her to put that in the helicopters is good to give you a contrary example. So I've got two students, they're talked about in the book, amazing students, Amanda Calabrese and Greta Meyer. They started a company called Sequel. They're reinventing the modern tampon. They spent their whole undergraduate career taking entrepreneurship classes and figuring out the science of reinventing this tampon, because they're athletes, was leaking and everything. So they have reinvented the Tampa, and they claim after 80 years that they finally reinvented the product and they got FDA approval. They got $5 million in venture capital. And in the name of full disclosure, I have invested $25,000 in the company. And I think it might be the first venture I've ever invested in. To be honest, I'm not like a venture capitalist, like. Like you were at least. But they have gone the hard way. So that's an example. Some of the other things that should be slow.

Boeing. Boeing. Talk about Boeing.

Oh, Boeing. This is the classic case that to do things right, sometimes you have to slow down, you know, slow down and fix things. Sometimes it actually has to work. Yes, that's really important, that when things are complicated, that rushing through and cutting corners can kill people. In the case of Boeing, fortunately, not us. Yet. One other thing which I think is important, I've been reading if you've seen this book, remarkable people. You've seen this book. My. My copy came with socks. Most people don't come with socks and headphones. I should be wearing the socks. Really cool socks. And my wife looked at me and she said, ooh, those are high quality socks. So you're not cheaping out. So anyway, so you know a lot about creativity. And have you ever interviewed Theresa Mobile from Harvard Business School? Seems like somebody you might have tripped over.

No, I don't know who she is.

Teresa's been studying creativity for 50 years. Amazing. Started as a Stanford PhD and she's just been studying all aspects of creativity. And essentially, if you look at her work and other research, you can't hurry love. You can't hurry creativity either. There's a point where if you try to rush it, the problem is there's a really high failure rate. There tends to be constructive disagreement. It's a messy, complicated process with a low success rate. And one of my favorite stories that's in the book was when Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed by the Harvard Business Review and they said, could McKinsey have made your process for Seinfeld more efficient? And he asked who McKinsey was and they told him he was a consulting firm. And then he said, are they funny? And they said, no, believe me, we know McKinsey. They are not funny. They may be other things. They are not funny. And then he said, the hard way is the right way. It's not something you make more efficient. And just the same as the venture capital world. The way that Jerry Seinfeld does a routine is he goes to venues that are very small and tries a few hundred jokes and keeps 15 or 20 of them for its set or something like that. So creativity is inefficient. Another thing that isn't efficient. And I just said, you can't hurry love. There's all this evidence that the most effective teams, everything from startup teams to surgical teams to people actually who fly airplanes too, that the more they've worked together, the more effective they are, like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. So you got that. And then the last. And I just thinking of you at this stage of your life and that surfing, which I just, I admire you with the surfing so much. It's just amazing how late in life you started, how into it you are.

Bob, just in the spirit of transparency, I rescheduled this interview because I wanted to surf.

I said that to my wife. I bet he's surfing. Hooray for you. All right. Where'd you go surfing?

Santa Cruz.

Oh, good for you. All right. Bless your heart. You're pretty sunburned, too. So this dovetails perfectly with your surfing this morning. I hope you hit the. That the waves are good and you had a nice ride. Actually, there's this amazing research which we just started getting into. In the book, it's on Savoring. And so there's all this research about coping and there's all this bad stuff in life we gotta deal with. But this guy's name is Fred Bryant. He's from the University of Michigan originally. And he's been savoring this notion that to have good mental health, what you do is you anticipate something great. You enjoy it while it's happening. You reflect on how wonderful it is. It's not just rushing through and checking the boxes. And so to me, this idea of strategic slowness, and yes, there's some things you gotta do really fast. If the blood's squirting out of me, I want the surgeon to sew me up really fast. I don't want him or her to slow down and enjoy the moment. I want to get that shit done. But that idea of savoring is another thing. Just from a leadership perspective, to slow down and to enjoy people and celebrate. And one of our mutual friends, David Kelly, IDEO fame. Back in the 90s, I hung out at Ideo a lot. And that's one thing David was always so good about, which was, like, when they completed a project or they had something to celebrate. And that was a very intensive place in terms of how people work in those days. He would rent an ice cream truck to come to Ideo and give away everybody free ice cream in the company just to get people to relax and enjoy life. And so that's another time. And maybe because we're both 70, at this point in my life, that savoring sounds like a pretty good deal, actually.

You also brought in your book the IKEA Effect, right, Which is savoring, too.

Savoring is strategic. That's making other people suffer. So this is the notion that labor leads to love. The IKEA effect is the harder you work at something independently of its value, the more you're going to think it's important. To justify all that effort you put into it. And my favorite thing about the IKEA effect studies, and we all know you go to Ikea, it's impossible to get through the place, even. But the IKEA effect, where they do the experiments was they show people a box and say, how much would you pay for this box? And people would sound like a buck fifty or something. And then they'd have them assemble the box, and then they'd say, how much do you pay for the box? It'd be like three bucks, because I put all this work into my stinking box. So that's. The IKEA effect is the notion that labor leads to love, which every fraternity, sorority, and military in the world knows. That the Navy SEALs, that the suffering. This must be worth it. I'm suffering.

We actually had Mike Norton on this week's episode of the podcast. So, yeah, we're familiar with the concept. So. Okay, but now listen, as I was reading your book, it was, like, very clear to me, okay? So there's bad friction. You got to take that out. I understand the good friction, which leads to savoring and higher quality and all that kind of stuff. I give you a theoretical example because I struggle with the contextual judgment of friction. So let me give you an example. So some of my friends, they have put Astroturf on their lawns. They don't have grass anymore. They put Astroturf. So you could say that Astroturf has reduced friction. There's no more water and no more mowing, no more all that. But you could also say that a lawn, a regular lawn, increases good friction because you're outdoors, you're exercising, you're interacting with your neighbors. But then you got to use a gas lawnmower that creates pollution. What is astral turf? Good friction or bad friction?

Honestly, this is a complete value judgment. I would say that some things that are low friction are just bad tastes. And if your friends have bad taste in low friction, that's just fine. You know, it reminds me a little bit of. There was this doctor I knew who every morning, what he would do when he had coffee. He would take really cheap instant coffee. He would dump the water and he'd stick in the microwave oven, and he'd stir it and he'd drink it and then run out the door. And that's Astroturf. To me, that's very low friction. But go back, I don't see any savoring in there. I savor my cup of coffee and my perspective that it's like, why doesn't he just take caffeine pills. Like you don't even need to drink coffee at all. If your goal is just to get the caffeine, probably better for your stomach. Right? Right. So anyways, I, I would just stick with what is it? Low friction, bad taste.

Could you make the case that the postal service, pony express, telephone, telegraph, email, text messaging, zoom all remove too much friction.

I'll remove too much friction. Ooh. Why do you say that?

Because all of those things meant no more face to face interaction.

What we're talking about a situation where there's or even and now the thing would the same thing as instant checkout. So in the process of the frictionless organization, we're also removing the possibility for human interaction. So in fact, in the book we talk about this is back to savoring. There's a chain of grocery stores, the largest grocery store chain in the Netherlands. They're called Jumbo. And what they did is for senior citizens like us who might be lonely, they came up.

I'm a senior citizen.

I'm not lonely. Yeah, me neither. In fact, I wish I was a little more lonely, sometimes less rich. Spent four days with my adult kids. No, eight days. So anyways, for those who are lonely, they have these chit chat lanes or slow checkout lanes when we just fact check this. They start this in one store and they they've scaled it to 225 of their stores. And the idea is you're getting in knowing it's sort of like a slow experience. So there are some things that should be higher friction for more sort of social interaction. And certainly that makes sense. And we know that it's like when you go to a three star Michelin restaurant, you don't get want to get in and out in 15 minutes. That's not what the goal is.

Wow, that is an interesting concept. I gotta tell you though, Bob, I love whole foods because I can just hold my right palm over the sensor and I don't have to get out my wallet. I don't even have to get on my iPhone. I told my kids if I'm about to die, cut off my hand. You can get free groceries the rest of your life.

So that's actually a good example. Even though it's morbid about cutting off your hands, that what good organizational design. And that's why we have the subtitle that the right things are easy and the wrong things are harder or slower. But the other thing is, I also think we're oversimplifying this in two ways. One Is, and this is one of my favorite examples, is that what good leaders do is they figure out how to or designers how to use good friction to get rid of bad friction. So one of my favorite examples, and so we've been bashing Google. So I'll say something good about Google. You may know Laszlo Bach, maybe Lazlo on your show, his book Work Rules. Great guy. He was basically head of HR or people operations, whatever they call it, Google for eight years. So he gets there, and Larry and Sergey did a pretty good job building the company and building the culture in the early days. But there's always that problem, that stuff that worked in the beginning gets to be a problem. And one of the things they did in building the culture was, and I remember, actually I have a tape recording from 2002 where I interviewed Larry Page, where he said, we're interviewing people 10, 15, 20 times because we want to build the right culture. And maybe that made sense in the early days, but Laszlo gets there some years later and the tradition continues. And he said, we've got people interviewing. And I remember doing the fact checking with him 10, 12, 15 times. He said, 25 times. Sometimes you get interviewed for a job 25 times and you don't get the offer. This is a good way to waste a lot of effort. So anyway, so he came up with a simple rule, which is, if you're going to do more than four job interviews, you just have to write me for written permission. That was the whole simple rule. And he said magically, the excessive interviews disappeared almost immediately. So to go back to the lesson, what good designers are always trying to do is to make it hard for people to add stuff that slows the whole system down. And the one that I'm doing some research on now with my friends at Asana is we even had this on this call, which is that I saw two apps and I went to the wrong app and you had to send me the email for the right app. And what happens in many organizations, including my employer, Stanford, if you have a credit card at Stanford, you can buy software for your use or your team's use, that therefore you impose on everybody who deals with you. And so what you end up having in organizations is, and they call this the credit card problem, is just zillions of different kind of software. And the causes switching and confusion and learning problems. And so what's happening in some of the companies we're working with is the CTOs are putting in more obstacles when you try to buy or renew software. So that to Me can be good friction. So that's one thing that I like to think about. The other thing, which I think is also important is friction can be weaponized. So it's good for you and bad for other people. In the most extreme case here, of course, are what they call roach motels, which is the example we've all had. You subscribe to something. I had this with the Financial Times, for example, and it's absolutely impossible to get out of it. Where they ask you, are you sure you want to get out? This is a mistake, Mr. Sutton. And I remember the Financial Times. I had to go through 15 different questions and finally, no, no, no, I want to get out of it. No, no, no, I want to get out of it. Which this, by the way, is unlawful in the state of California, but not other states. Now. But that's another kind of way in which friction is used as weaponized to make it impossible for us to get rid of software and gym memberships, things like that.

When I read that example, it brought to mind something that I just happened to me last week. I quit Mailchimp. I deleted my Mailchimp account and it was in 5 seconds, it was so fast, I thought, something is wrong here. I could not have quit. And then I quit so fast. I went on LinkedIn and I went on Threads and I said, kudos to mailchimp. They let me quit so easily. If only the rest of their company worked that well. But.

That'S actually interesting because when we were working on the book, we talked to some of the folks at Netflix who were involved in the decision long before it was the law to make it really easy to quit. And including Patty McCord, who was head of HR there for years, for 14 years. And she said two things. She said, first of all, in the early days when it was hard to quit, we were just embarrassed. Our friends would say, I tried to quit Netflix, it would be terrible. And the other thing she said, and this is the mailchimp thing, is she said, we actually figured out from a long term strategic standpoint that if it was easy to quit, we'd have really good data about dissatisfaction because that's much better than giving people a survey if they're quitting easily. You get much more sensitive data about dissatisfaction. So one of the reasons she argued that Netflix has done so well in the long term is they've always had great data about customer dissatisfaction because it's so easy to quit. And also it's not a subscription. You can quit anytime.

Wow, I never thought of that. It Makes intuitive sense. If you're so happy it was easy to quit, you're willing to invest some time giving the company feedback. That makes perfect sense.

Also, the other thing Patty said about making it easy to quit is that to come back that you're not going to get in a roach motel that you can quit again. The example is not to call out one of my daughters, but I got a daughter. I think you might have met. Eve, went to school with your son. So Eve, with all due respect, she's like the Imelda Marcos of the family. She loves her shoes. She has so many shoes. In fact, she just went to Europe with with her boyfriend and she sent me a picture of how proud she was of how she packed her five pairs of shoes in her suitcase for Carry On. Literally. She's a shoe girl. So anyway, only five pairs. Oh, oh, six. She was wearing one, remember? So anyway, for her that's nothing. So anyway, I see how many shoes she returns to Amazon. It's just amazing. I honestly think that she only keeps one out of four pairs of shoes because unfortunately I see it because I think when I'm 90 and my kids are 50, there's so many in the family Amazon account that's the same thing. Up next on Remarkable People. One definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience that the little people have to deal with. So what they'll do as senior executives, and I guess whiny professors like me, is that they create a completely friction free experience that the little people are not protected from.

Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It's our pleasure and honor to make the show for you. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this.

Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

I loved your example. We're going all over the map in this interview, but I loved your example about how much TSA Pre has helped people. That is so true.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Because TSA pre is an example of something that has made all of our lives easier. But the other thing. And yes, we can all bash government for not being efficient enough. And yes, oh God, we know how terrible the bureaucracy is and how hard things can be to get done. And I can tell my stories and I'm sure you can, but there are bright spots in government and I think it's important to give people credit. In the book we talk about this amazing group in Michigan. There was a benefits form that 2point million Michiganders filled out a year to get health care, to get food stamps, things like that. Longest benefits form in the United States. A thousand questions. One question was, when was your child conceived? This was like just crazy form. And a guy named Michael Brennan did the work, to work with the bureaucrats, to work with the frontline employees over two years and the lawyers. Because you do a new form, you got to have a lot of lawyers. They had a lot to comply to. Now there's a form that's 80% shorter, that's filled out by 2.5 million Michiganers. So there is hope. And now people don't seem to believe us, but the California DMV is actually getting a little bit better.

Oh, I think it's much better.

I'm glad to hear that because I.

Don'T want to mention I spoke to the CIOs of all of California and the DMV was there. And I said, the fact that you can go on the California DMV website and, and get their number before you leave for the office is amazing because.

I don't want to overstate it because we do talk about an example in the book of a guy who came out and made my visit to the DMV much more pleasant and faster than I ever expected by basically doing triage. But now Huggy and I are doing a case study with Steve Gordon, a guy from Cisco who's head of the DMV. He's visited all 180 field offices of the DMV and he's asked how to improve stuff. He's done all this digitization stuff. So yes, there are still challenges just having visited the DMV again last week to get my real id. It's not perfect. There are still some unhappy people, but you get through there faster. The employees are more friendly and supportive. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's an example that government can be made better, even the dmv. And so that's what I've been saying to.

I've been saying, oh, we agree on that. We agree on that.

Good.

So let's say people are listening to this and they say, okay, enough with this. The stories, boys, just tell me how do I add good friction and how do I remove bad friction? What's the tactics?

The book has a bazillion interventions points, but the main points we have are, we call it oblivious leaders. If you're a leader, try to be aware of what we call your cone of friction. How your behavior influences people around you. Are you writing overly long emails? Are you keeping them too long in meetings? Are you calling too many meetings? A great example, a well known software firm that I know, I won't name it, but some people may GUESS it was 400 vice presidents. They were complaining there were too many slack messages. The slack messages were too long and they were irrelevant. And the head of learning development, she interrupts me and she says, so who's sending those slack messages? Could each one of you please look in the mirror? And so that to me is an example of the sort of oblivious executive. So it's your executive behavior. The next one we talk about is the notion of trying to stem what we call addition sickness. There's all sorts of evidence that as human beings our natural way of solving problems is to add and add and add and add. More people, more software, more initiatives. But what good organizations do is they have some discipline about subtraction. A quick thing we've done, and we used the example already of the getting rid of stupid stuff exercise in Hawaii is that we've played something we call the subtraction game with more than 200 organizations. That's what we were doing with the unnamed large software company. As we said, what should you get rid of? And we did. Sometimes it's just like bs, but other times they actually make progress. And just one little example, I was working with a pharmaceutical company in the general counsel head lawyer, he said, I'm counting, just in the middle of playing the subtraction game, what you get rid of. We have 80 family leave policies because they're in different countries and everything. And he wrote me back two weeks later that he'd gotten it down to 60. Now that's not completely trimming, but that's an example. And then two more. One is broken connections. Look at the handoffs in your organization and fix them in health care. That's a huge issue. And then finally, my favorite jargon monoxide, which are essentially the incomprehensible language that people use in your organization that nobody can understand. And to put in a word for chatgpt in this crazy times, if you instruct chatgpt to make things simpler and to bring down the reading level, you can actually simplify the language in your organization. So I'm just doing a rant, but to reduce destructive friction, what's your behavior as a leader? What can you subtract handoffs in that foul jargon monoxide? You clean up your language. Basically.

This is example of this Vice provost of Stanford sending out an email with 1300 words and 7300 word attachment.

Attachment.

And so I know what I think, but don't you think if he or she had stuck that email in ChatGPT and said, Simplify this, make it high school reading level, it would have been ten times better?

Yes. And just to be clear, so this was an email that was sent out to all 2000 tenure track faculty inviting us to spend a Saturday, a full Saturday, brainstorming on Zoom about the new door sustainability school. So it was just like, please give us your time. You know, you're sitting at home during the pandemic. And I did immediately forward the email to her boss and suggest that this, this was not good management. But yes, if that person had put in ChatGPT, it would have been much shorter. And there are some great uses of Chat GPT in addition to the fact that it's fun to poke one of my bosses that there was a surgical consent form that was used by the largest healthcare provider in the state of Rhode Island. I can't remember the name right now. And what they did was they took their form, which was at the 12th grade reading level, and it was three pages long, and they said, made it make it simpler and shorter. And what they got back was something that was about a page long and was at the sixth grade reading level. And now they're using more or less what they got back for 35,000 people a year. Chat GPT and all these large language models. The problem is they're more efficient for adding friction because you can just use it to write zillions of emails and to change things. So you got to be careful that it can be weaponized against people. But if we're disciplined and view it as an, as an editing tool rather than an addition tool, it could help us.

Maybe there's a product idea there that Slack could offer this feature where every message you send in Slack will first go through our AI and we'll simplify it for you and it all come out the other and it'll be shorter and better.

So I would not be surprised if that already exists. There's a woman named Clara Shy who is one of my students, former students, and is head of AI at Salesforce. And I think she would say that something like that may have been developed already. I'm not sure, but I think it may actually exist. Okay. Okay.

So now let's talk about friction again.

And.

And how hard or easy should it be for a party to change their presidential candidate?

Well, I don't mean to be political, but I will be Political, Yes. I think that it should be easy. And it's interesting that to tell you a story out of school. A good friend of mine is Adam Grant. I knew him before he was so famous it was ridiculous. And he's always been a man. So the number of messages we exchange being concerned about Joe Biden's behavior is unbelievable. But Adam being Adam, that three days later he had a piece in New York Times describing this as an example of escalating commitment to a failing course of action. As publicly you commit to something, the harder it is to get rid of. And especially when you're surrounded with people have an incentive for you to keep going, even though they know it's not for the greater good, something has to be done about it. So, yes, it should be easier.

Okay, so now what companies are in the Sutton hall of Friction fame for removing friction in an outstanding way?

Well, so the idea that there's companies that are consistently great at it, I think they go through periods where they're good and where they're bad. I do think, just to name a couple. And they have other problems. Amazon's actually from the beginning been quite good. And I think Jeff Bezos is very, very disciplined about being frugal, but also being customer focused. And 2014, I gave a speech up there, which of course was unpaid, which is part of the frugality. And I remember just asking them, so what's sacred and what's taboo here? And almost in unison they said, what's sacred is the customer, and what's taboo is wasting money. And they're very good about using people's time during meetings. And it's not just frugality. They're a disciplined company. So I think that Amazon actually would be pretty good. The other one, which is more controversial and maybe almost too much, and I am going there to give a talk in a couple of weeks, is Walmart, which is the largest private employer in the United States. They really have a lot of discipline about, for example, organizational simplicity. Walmart only has eight, eight levels of hierarchy from the store manager to the CEO. And if I compare that, let's say to what is it? Meta, slash, Facebook, which has. I think they're trying to reduce them now. They had something like 12 a while ago. And so those are some that that come to mind. And then I even hate to bring up Jensen Huang and Nvidia, but man, talk about a disciplined place and the nature of their discipline. And it's good to compare them to Amazon and to Walmart because Walmart and Amazon are Command and control places, they really are. It's top down, you will do what you are told kind of places. But the difference for Nvidia is that the way that they do it is by cultural control. I think he's got 50 direct reports, which according to some of my other work, it should be impossible for a CEO to have 50 direct reports and do their job. But if you trust them completely and you don't micromanage them completely, and maybe it's possible. So maybe my theory about organizational design is wrong. And I was talking to a woman just two weeks ago who's working at Nvidia. She was like an accountant. She's been working there for about 15 years. And all this stuff about remote work, how many days a week do we have? We know this. There's just a huge amount of research and argument and Jamie Dimming is saying they got to be back in the office, blah, blah, blah. And so I said, so what's Jensen's take on this? Oh, Jensen trusts us and he says that we each should do what's best for us, even though we have really, really nice offices to go to. What a concept, trusting people. You get rid of a lot of friction if you don't spend all that time watching them really, really closely and monitoring them really, really closely and always being worried about the lawsuit and they do something wrong. And then in organizations like that, we have a strong culture. When somebody does something wrong, it doesn't have to be top down. Their colleagues will slam them because they're ruining it for all of us. And we know that's what a good culture is. So.

So now who's in the Sutton hall of Friction Shame?

Hall of Shame. I hate to say it, but I know too much. But I believe my employer, Stanford, God love them, I think that we have got serious problems, that we make things much harder than they need to be for faculty, staff and students. And in my aforementioned argument before is that sometimes organizations, they can't get rid of the friction, but other times they have enough money that they spend money as a substitute for thinking. I think we do some of that. And then the one that I really would call out and I talk about in the book is Comcast. Comcast. Try their phone tree. You want bad AI, they make it virtually impossible for you to get through to a human. And I'm not alone in bashing Comcast. And I talk about this in the book, one thing they do that makes it even worse. So when I had trouble getting through to Comcast because my mother had passed away and was dealing with a bunch of complicated issues for her house. I actually wrote on Twitter complaining about Comcast. And I know a board member. I won't name him, but I've met him three or four times. So he writes me like a personal message and says, I'll get you to someone. So three days later, I'm on like the VIP line. So I call one ring and somebody in Arizona and everything was fixed immediately. And then they did something else for my son in San Francisco and they went in person and they didn't charge us. It was the nicest person you ever met. And so the problem that Comcast has, which some organizations have, some airlines, and sometimes General Motors too, is one of the reasons the system is so screwed up is that one definition of privilege is the absence of inconvenience that the little people have to deal with with. So what they'll do as senior executives, and I guess whiny professors like me, is that they create a completely friction free experience that the little people are not protected from. And this is one of my arguments about the problems that General Motors has had and why the car buying experience is so bad is when you're a General Motors manager or executive, they just bring you a new car every four to six months. You don't have to deal with, with even gassing it or repairing it or the trade in or blah, blah, blah, that it's such a horrible experience that literally the people who make the cars are especially the senior executives, they're protected from the inconveniences and hassles and humiliations that the rest of us have when we buy a car. So that's one of the things that drives me crazy when organizations not only are crappy, but they protect their executives and other powerful people and critics from having a bad experience. Comcast is very high on my income. So with.

I have had the same experience with Verizon and I happen to know someone on the board of directors who just made everything magically happen for me. But as this was happening, I was thinking, you know what, if you don't know somebody on the board of directors of Verizon, this is just wrong. And then I also know, Bob, that what you mentioned, that if I go on Twitter and I mention any brand by name and I say something is screwed up, something is wrong, whatever, I get instant support, instant VIP treatment. And that that's the only argument I can make for why you want a lot of followers and to stay on Twitter.

Now, the one place where it may not help by the way, health care, the problem with healthcare in the U.S. we have many problems, but there's so much friction and fragmentation that there might be somebody in one spot, like one hospital or one insurance company, who has some power, but having mastery over the whole disconnected, confused system. That's one of the reasons health care is so terrible. And we talk about this some in the book, and there are some people who are trying to deal with the friction and fragmentation in healthcare, but the pieces, they don't really fit together. So it doesn't matter how powerful you are. And this happens to some of my friends who their parents or they will get cancer. And we talk about the cancer tax in the book, and they just can't believe how difficult it is to navigate the system, even though they've been doctors for 30 years. And they thought that they were all powerful because they had control over the little domain. But the health care system in the US Is really a problem in terms of gluing the pieces together. And some systems are better than others. I would point to the Cleveland Clinic, and I had heart surgery there, and I chose heart surgeries there over Stanford 14 years ago. So I'm putting my body where my mouth is here. They have a much better integrated system than most healthcare systems do.

We covered a gamut of good friction, bad friction, assholes, mission driven assholes. What else do you want to talk about? What do you want people to remember? From Bob Sutton?

First of all, I've been blessed in that I mostly get to talk about and try to coach people in organizations. And the older I get, the more that I realize it's a lot easier to talk about and even to try to coach people than to be in the pit trying to do the work of being a leader, being an engineer, being an organizational or product designer that it's a lot easier to talk about and criticize than to actually do it. So what's that expression? The dogs bark but the caravan rolls on? So I realize I've been privileged to be a barking dog and paid pretty well for just barking rather than getting in there. So I guess I try to learn from people who are smarter than me and from the academic research about the best things to do. But I have a lot of respect for everybody from CEOs to middle managers to engineers to people on the front lines to people in the military to people in government for how hard their jobs are to do. And I have met very few people who have ill intention. And so I really do admire most people who are actually in workplaces Bob.

I gotta agree with you, man. I tell you, most of the people I meet in all my talks and all my visits and all that, and they may work in the worst organization, I think from the outside, but when you meet them, it's not them they're trying it's systems and other things. It's not because they're incompetent or lazy or stupid.

And I would especially point out to civil servants. So my, my friends who did the work with the state of Michigan that reduced this benefit form by 80% that was filled out by 2.5 million people. One of them, Adam Seltzer, Stanford grad. And he said, I thought I was gonna deal with these Michigan civil servants, they just wouldn't care. And he said they cared so much, they wanted to fix the system more than anybody so they could be proud of their jobs rather than having to apologize and be ashamed of it.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Remarkable People. The most important part of this episode is learning how to remove friction. And you can do this in order to increase your effectiveness, to increase the effectiveness of your organization and to be a remarkable person and make the world a better place. So let's remember Bob Sutton's advice about how to do that. Now I want to thank the Remarkable People team. That would be of course, Tessa Nyser, our researchers, Madison Nismer, producer and co author with me in the book Think Remarkable. And then we have Louise Magana, Fallon Yates and Alexis Nishimura. And last but not least is our amazing sound design team. That would be Jeff C. And Shannon Hernandez. This is the Remarkable People team. We wake up every day thinking, how can we help you be remarkable? Until next time, mahalo and aloha. This is Remarkable People.