The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00:00:08:22 - 00:00:36:08
Kevin Eikenberry
Friction. We experience it at work and typically we don't think of it as a good thing. Our guest today calls that destructive friction, the things that happen, and maybe we unknowingly create that suck the life and productivity out of our work. Today we're talking about his friction project, understanding and eliminating the disruptive or destructive friction and maybe finding some good kinds of friction as well.

00:00:36:09 - 00:01:01:16
Kevin Eikenberry
Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership podcast, where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally to lead more effectively and make a bigger positive difference for their teams, organizations and the world. If you are listening to this podcast in the future, you could be with us live. If you want to know when we're doing live Simulcasts and how you can join us on your favorite social channel.

00:01:01:18 - 00:01:31:14
Kevin Eikenberry
And you can join our Facebook or LinkedIn groups where we make announcements about those things. So you can just go to remarkable podcast icon slash Facebook or remarkable podcast icon slash LinkedIn to get all the scoop and join us in the future. Hope you'll do that. Now, today's episode is brought to you by our remarkable master classes pick from 13 important leadership in Life skills to help you become more effective, productive and confident while overcoming some of the leader's toughest challenges.

00:01:31:15 - 00:01:51:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Learn more and sign up at remarkable. Matt Excuse me remarkable masterclass dot com. Our guest today. I'm going to bring him in right now. For those of you that are live or watching the video, you can see him. His name is Bob Sutton. Rob, let me tell you about him and we'll dive in. And I'm guessing you already know him.

00:01:51:11 - 00:02:16:02
Kevin Eikenberry
Robert, I Sutton is an organizational psychologist and professor of management, science and engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. He has given keynote speeches to more than 200 groups in 20 countries and served on numerous, numerous scholarly editorial boards. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Businessweek, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post.

00:02:16:04 - 00:02:41:10
Kevin Eikenberry
He is a frequent guest on various television and radio programs, has written seven books and edited two volumes, including the bestsellers The No Asshole Rule, Good Boss, Bad Boss, and Scaling Up Excellence. His newest book, coauthored with Huggy Rao is The Friction Project. How Smart Leaders Make Things, make the Right things Easier and the Wrong things Harder. And that is our focus today.

00:02:41:15 - 00:02:51:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Bob, welcome. I have had you on my list of people I've wanted to have to meet or slash be on this show for a long time. So I'm glad to have you here. Welcome.

00:02:51:12 - 00:02:54:21
Bob Sutton
It's great to meet you. And I'm excited to talk to your audience.

00:02:54:23 - 00:03:12:19
Kevin Eikenberry
All right. So I'm going to start here. You talk early in the book. I always ask this question. Bob was asked the question like, tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you end up doing this kind of work? But because people know a little bit about you, from what I've already said, I'm going to actually say how.

00:03:12:22 - 00:03:19:14
Kevin Eikenberry
How is it that you decided like seven years ago to to do this thing called the Friction Project?

00:03:19:16 - 00:03:50:01
Bob Sutton
boy, I don't want to do that. So that. So it was kind of a two pronged set. I love I love the prompt. It was it was sort of a two pronged set of forces. The first one, the one that I would say, like the official explanation was the book that we did before. Since we're alive, the scale scaling up science with how we worked with a lot of organizations that had the goal to get big because that's scale.

00:03:50:01 - 00:04:26:13
Bob Sutton
We want to scale, baby scale. I mean, I was around Facebook a little bit when they had two or 300 people, Salesforce sort of early pre IPO, Google pretty early. And what happened was in those cases, in so many other cases, in the process of their dreams becoming true, the leaders of those organizations in much smaller organizations to even even idea as it grew from 40 or 50 people to 200 would be another example because I was a fellow there that things will get harder and harder to get done.

00:04:26:15 - 00:04:53:01
Bob Sutton
And and and so that was one. And then then when we teach executives, as you do you teach executives all the time, they would talk about things like working in a frustration factory. I work in a frustration factory. I remember that or I remember one woman, a middle manager from HP. I don't mean to call it HP, but she said something like, How do they expect me to show any initiative when I when I'm sort of like struggling to walk through this shit every day?

00:04:53:03 - 00:05:18:10
Bob Sutton
So so that was that was sort of like the professional part that we were hearing the message. Then the other part, since I have been at Stanford for more than 40 years and the percentage of students or the number of students and faculty has not actually grown that much, maybe 25%, that the number of administrators has grown just exponentially.

00:05:18:12 - 00:05:20:02
Bob Sutton
And so more than.

00:05:20:02 - 00:05:22:06
Kevin Eikenberry
25%. Are you saying, Bob?

00:05:22:08 - 00:05:42:02
Bob Sutton
Well, it depends on how you calculate it. And there's some controversy about that. But the question is, literally in the press, there's some controversy about whether we have more students or more administrators. It depends how you count them. And I could go on and on, but but there were a lot of things that used to be easier to do at Stanford.

00:05:42:02 - 00:06:10:15
Bob Sutton
And some of them should be should be hard to do. It should be hard to steal and cheat and stuff like that. I'm all for that. But but other things have gotten more and more difficult at and and then on top of that, it's the email revolution. So the book starts with with a 166 word email with a 7500 word attachment from a senior administrator who invited all 20 faculty members to spend a Saturday brainstorming together literally like a giant, like gang brainstorm.

00:06:10:17 - 00:06:35:16
Bob Sutton
And I thought that was sort of, to use the term almost an abuse of power because of the amount of time that she was taking away from us. So anyway, so, so to end there and that was sort of the bad news. Maybe we get to the good news, but it was both, you know, dealing with other people and our own personal frustration with with Stanford and also with other places where we were consumers about how difficult it was to get things done.

00:06:35:16 - 00:06:53:16
Bob Sutton
And you and I were talking off air about health care, boy. Health care is a real it's really a big problem in the U.S. health care system. But those are the two. It's usually that way for me. I have to have both. I have to have some intellectual argument and I have to have something has to get me in the gut if I don't feel it here.

00:06:53:18 - 00:07:04:02
Bob Sutton
Since you write books, too. Otherwise, I don't have the what he called the energy in me and the wherewithal to keep writing sentence after sentence. And it has to be something that stirs me up a little bit.

00:07:04:04 - 00:07:27:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, I think that, you know, I opened the intro by saying using that word friction. Right. And I think we all sort of know what that means or what that feels like. And I describe what you call destructive friction. And and then one of the things you talk about in the book, I'm going to read a phrase and then I want to comment because you talk about early in the book and I told you there would be no there'd be no, I'm not going to say, hey, tell me what's on page 23.

00:07:27:10 - 00:07:29:06
Kevin Eikenberry
I'm just going to read you what's on page 23.

00:07:29:09 - 00:07:31:20
Bob Sutton
Well, you can I'll make it up.

00:07:31:22 - 00:07:55:20
Kevin Eikenberry
It's about being a friction fixer. And you said our seven year project taught us that. Taught us that a bedrock belief of friction fixers is this, that if we focus on what to make easier and faster and what to make harder and slower, life will be better for workers and the people they serve. So when I framed the opening here, and you've been talking about sort of one kind of friction, which is what we'll call bad friction.

00:07:55:20 - 00:08:06:11
Kevin Eikenberry
Right, Right. Friction. But what you're saying here is there's really two kinds here. What do you mean by that? And then maybe talk a little bit about good friction for a second.

00:08:06:13 - 00:08:30:16
Bob Sutton
Sure. So, I mean, so what we mean by that is that is that there are a whole bunch of things that organizations let's just say the process of hiring people that when I get back to that in a second, the process of of of I don't know, setting up meetings, of getting our expense reports reimbursed, all these sort of things that should be relatively easy.

00:08:30:18 - 00:08:50:02
Bob Sutton
And then there are some things that should be harder or impossible. So it should be difficult to cheat. That should be impossible or very difficult. And then and I'll go through this in some detail later. There's a whole bunch of things that should be slow and difficult and where people just need to pause or not do it at all.

00:08:50:03 - 00:09:06:05
Bob Sutton
We can get into the unethical stuff, but there's one story I like to tell because in some ways it shows to me the interplay between good and bad friction. It's almost the best summary of the book. So I got the book right here. I used Laszlo Bock, who is essentially great book work rules that maybe had him on your show.

00:09:06:07 - 00:09:33:04
Bob Sutton
Anyhow, so laszlo is head of essentially h.r. People operations at google for about eight years when it was more functional than it was. Now google has some struggles right now and there was a tradition that google which made a lot of sense in the early days when larry and Sergey, the founders, they would interview job candidates eight 1015 according to Laszlo, as many as 25 times before they would make a hiring decision.

00:09:33:04 - 00:09:52:14
Bob Sutton
And Jeff Pfeiffer and I actually interviewed Laszlo Laszlo, Larry Page in 2002, and I got the transcript. I was just looking at it recently and he was talking about how everybody Sanford was mad at him because they were interviewing people so many times before they hired him, but he wanted to have people who were both technically skilled and had and had the management skills to build.

00:09:52:14 - 00:10:11:00
Bob Sutton
The company had very clear vision, which was smart for scaling, really. But this becomes ingrained in the company and it becomes a tradition. Just think about if you got to interview somebody 15 or 20 times before you hire them. Think about logistics and scheduling. And by the way, you also piss off the best candidates who in those days will go to Facebook.

00:10:11:02 - 00:10:34:10
Bob Sutton
I'll go somewhere else. Yeah, I'll go so much. So Laszlo did books called Work Rules. He put in a simple rule, which is if you're going to do more than four job interviews, you need personal approval from me. So that's a speed bump. That's the way I would summarize. It's good friction to reduce bad friction. And he said he couldn't believe how well it worked.

00:10:34:12 - 00:10:48:13
Bob Sutton
And and there's a lot of messages in there that that what is a top down authority can be benevolent for everybody's good It's not always bad. And I like that story because because it shows the interplay between good and bad friction.

00:10:48:15 - 00:11:14:15
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah. And in fact, you have it. You have a section where you actually use that example to walk us through what you call the friction forensics. And listen, it's not it's not going to be a great podcast for you to walk through all eight of those things. But but just talk about that idea of like, how do we start to parse out when the points that I made earlier, when we should speed up and when we should slow down?

00:11:14:17 - 00:11:20:15
Bob Sutton
Well, if I would pick one and you're right, there's like 13 of them. So I'm an academic or something.

00:11:20:20 - 00:11:22:14
Kevin Eikenberry
I think there's only eight, but there's plenty.

00:11:22:18 - 00:11:42:16
Bob Sutton
Yeah, well, I actually since I have a slide deck that has 13 of them on and I'm actually looking at it right now. So, you know, professors so I talk about addition sickness, I'm suffering from it. So, so, so if I were to pick one at the very top, the Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, he talks about moving fast and slow.

00:11:42:18 - 00:12:11:15
Bob Sutton
The basic argument is that in his terms, when you're in a cognitive minefield, when you don't know what to do, when things are all messed up, when people are confused, that's when you just pull over and figure out what is going on and there's lots of examples that we use in the book. Maybe one of the simplest one is Waze, the navigation software, which probably many folks in the audience use.

00:12:11:17 - 00:12:30:13
Bob Sutton
Waze is an example where Noam Bardin, the CEO, and when they got $30 million in venture capital, this is way back in 2011 or 2012, the venture capitalist wanted him to hire people to do a bunch of product development. But there was a problem where when people downloaded Waze, if they if you waited 30 days, none of them were using it.

00:12:30:15 - 00:12:51:18
Bob Sutton
So he just put the brakes on for six weeks and everybody in the team figured out what was wrong, including not hiring people, by the way. Because when you add more people to a confused project, it makes things even worse. And then you quickly. Yeah, there's a great book called The Mythical Man Won that makes that argument quite elegantly.

00:12:51:20 - 00:13:12:02
Bob Sutton
So anyway, so, so, so to us, that's if I would pick one. That's it. And the analogy that I've been using lately that I kind of like is, is in some ways, if you think of yourself as a race car driver, Formula One or NASCAR, whatever you like or is that the people win the races, do not put the pedal to the metal the entire time.

00:13:12:07 - 00:13:34:07
Bob Sutton
They slow down for the curve so they don't wipe out. They do pit stops, they don't run out of gas. And so so there's also that there's also that sort of analogy. And that also gets us to something that I know you know a lot about, which is burnout or keeping people going emotionally that, you know, you're kind of doing a marathon, you're doing lemons, you're not doing a drag race.

00:13:34:09 - 00:13:36:20
Bob Sutton
Use the analogy.

00:13:36:22 - 00:13:38:12
Kevin Eikenberry
I live in Indianapolis, for heaven's sake.

00:13:38:12 - 00:14:05:18
Bob Sutton
That's right. You live in Indianapolis, 500. Yeah. Yeah. So? So anyway, so and we could I could go on and on and on with with examples of times when slowing down works. The second one that I would pick and then now we can discuss some other stuff is that all the evidence on creative work is that if you rush it too much and if you add too much efficiency to it, you are going to mess it up.

00:14:05:18 - 00:14:28:16
Bob Sutton
And you can look at my my friend and colleague Teresa Marble spent 50 years studying creativity, and that's one of her number one things. If you put if you put the gun to your head, rush ahead, go faster. Everything stops. Ed Catmull, one of the stars of the book who led Pixar for 32 years. He makes the argument that we almost never thought about speed and efficiency.

00:14:28:22 - 00:14:51:16
Bob Sutton
We just thought about iterating over and over again till it was right. And yes, there might be ways to make things less inefficient. But but, but when it comes to creative work, people think they can make it more efficient and speeded up. There's there's a pretty bad history there. I'm even thinking I spent a fair amount of time at one point working with the auto industry, especially General Motors.

00:14:51:18 - 00:15:20:16
Bob Sutton
And they were always trying to help the product development process. And and I remember one guy telling me from General Motors, there's one way we've always been able to figure out how to speed up the product development process, and that is to claim that we started later than we actually did because because there's this phase they call phase zero, that's phase zero since we're authors, Phase zero is when we're trying to figure out which book to write and to outline the that that's what we created.

00:15:20:19 - 00:15:39:05
Bob Sutton
But Phase zero is where they sort of muck around and sort of figure out the general general characteristics and market for the car. And so I remember him saying, So I've been involved in multiple, multiple projects where we sped up the project about one process by simply removing phase zero from the timeline.

00:15:39:06 - 00:15:41:17
Kevin Eikenberry
That we saw happen. But we didn't talk about that. We did.

00:15:41:18 - 00:16:07:15
Bob Sutton
Right, right, right, right. That point where you're just you just sort of you just sort of sitting around confused. And I remember an old software executive who led a company that made computer games. And I remember him saying it's a lot cheaper to to pay for designers to sit around and drink coffee for a year to figure out what game to develop than to take a bad game and put 300 people on it and develop it really fast.

00:16:07:17 - 00:16:13:19
Bob Sutton
He said that it was sort of like the main lesson that that he learned, you know, being a gaming executive.

00:16:13:21 - 00:16:33:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, and we've all and here's the thing, even those of us that mess this up have all heard this phrase go slow to go fast. Right? Right. That's fundamentally the idea that you're describing right there. And all of us will politely not at that. Or I mean, I've written it and people say, well, we already know that. yeah, but you're not doing it.

00:16:33:15 - 00:16:58:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Like there's two different things here, right? Between what we there's a difference in what we know. The the knowing and doing gap as we might, we might talk about it. So one of the things that comes to me as I read the book, and it's in part because I am working on my next book, where we're one of the big ideas is that the answer is seldom at the ends of the spectrum, but it's somewhere in the middle.

00:16:58:05 - 00:17:19:07
Kevin Eikenberry
And like what we're talking about is like too fast is too fast, too slow is too slow. The right answer is somewhere in the middle. It all depends on what the exact situation or context is, of course, And and so like any other thoughts about how to figure out that balance, if we're going to call it a balance.

00:17:19:10 - 00:17:58:07
Bob Sutton
Well, so I guess I have I have two thoughts. One thought is it depends on how deep a relationship that you need and want to do the work. And, you know, to steal a line from the Supremes. You can't hurry, love. And that's in the book somewhere. And and I and and if you look at situations, there's very good evidence that teams that start new organizations that actually put on Broadway plays that do surgery, that fly airplanes, that the more experience they have together, the better they tend to perform.

00:17:58:09 - 00:18:19:19
Bob Sutton
And Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett would be sort of exhibit one. They they were together for 60 years. But but and yes, there are many things in life you can do efficiently if you have strangers, including people who fly on airplanes and do surgery. They know what the procedures are. But it turns out even people who fly airplanes that do surgery, the more they work together, the better they do.

00:18:19:23 - 00:18:43:10
Bob Sutton
So. So to me, that's one thing is, is whether you're just having like a quick we're just going to get it done sort of thing or you want a long term relationship and you really want to want to do it. Then the other thing and since we're both leadership people and this is the leadership podcast and show is there's some really interesting research, you do talk about it in the book and I did a little bit of that with her.

00:18:43:15 - 00:19:06:11
Bob Sutton
It's by a woman named Lindy Greer. She's now at University of Michigan. She's at Stanford for a while. And her argument is in this again, gets sort of like fast or slow. It's sort of when you as a leader interject versus get out of the way. So so what her research shows and she's done everything from experiments to to following CEOs of startups here in Silicon Valley.

00:19:06:13 - 00:19:27:08
Bob Sutton
And what her research shows is that the best leaders know when to switch gears between, if you will, activating the hierarchy, kind of going man and control mode. So that's when they make a decision. They tell people to shut up and to go to work, because when there's an emergency, sometimes you have to do that it or they just say, okay, I've heard enough.

00:19:27:13 - 00:19:52:15
Bob Sutton
Here's my decision. We've got to move forward versus flattening the hierarchy and saying, let's brainstorm, or they might pass around the talking stick. Or is my my friend they reduce that. My my friend and and mentor David Kelly who started idea of the that famous unfortunately fading design firm and also the Stanford design school that I'm a co-founder of.

00:19:52:15 - 00:20:14:23
Bob Sutton
But he was really the main leader David has this remarkable ability to bring together a bunch of smart people, walk to the back of the room and then walk out of the room. I even wrote an article about him, actually him and President Kennedy use the method of getting together a bunch of people and realizing that their authority might stifle conversation and walking out of the room.

00:20:15:01 - 00:20:18:15
Bob Sutton
So. So I cut their magic by walking out of the room. So let me just say.

00:20:18:15 - 00:20:53:01
Kevin Eikenberry
Something about that. Can I say something that I didn't know that David Kelly did that. So I'm starting to feel smart all of a sudden. I do that with my team all the time. Like I feel like there's a like a team is a team is working on something or there's a topic that that, that I feel like I can add some context or I can add some value, but not by staying so relatively frequently because it's valuable for me to be there for a bit and it's more but then my value goes away because you can't forget that he's the boss.

00:20:53:01 - 00:21:14:12
Kevin Eikenberry
I mean, right. Mike does. He writes the paycheck, His name is on the company. That makes it like, you know, I'm not the president United States, but they get a paycheck that I sign, right? So so I think that's a really important thing. And the reason I the reason I'm adding myself into that, everybody is not because not for an ego stroke.

00:21:14:12 - 00:21:31:11
Kevin Eikenberry
I'm really doing that because you can do that as a leader at any place in the organization. Like you don't have to be the founder of the company, the president, United States. That strategy. You can do that as a front line leader. Everybody, I don't care where you sit, that approach that we just describe is something you can absolutely do.

00:21:31:11 - 00:21:37:01
Kevin Eikenberry
And once you understand that that's even possible, it can be of great value to you.

00:21:37:06 - 00:21:58:02
Bob Sutton
What saves you time in it? And it helps your people brainstorm the other the other part that that I would add is that and David Kelly does this too. David Kelly knows when to get back in the room, too, because I was the ideal fellow for 19 years and I've been involved and I'm still involved in the Stanford School with him to some degree.

00:21:58:04 - 00:22:17:01
Bob Sutton
And when things are messed up, I he will interject. He will call us all together. I mean, the classic thing that happens and we've all seen this is you've got sort of like a middle manager type person who's really messing things up. So we all have to get together with David and say, what do we do about it?

00:22:17:07 - 00:22:32:22
Bob Sutton
Do we give him feedback? Do we fire him? What do? And that's where you sort of activate the hierarchy, and then it's David or other skilled leaders who make who make the decision. So so I think that's really important.

00:22:32:23 - 00:22:56:19
Kevin Eikenberry
So even though everybody I had never met Bob until like 8 minutes before we went live, I already knew that we would have way more to talk about than we could possibly talk about. As we're talking about his latest book, The Friction Project How Smart Leaders Make Things Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong things Harder. We're not going to get through all of it, so just go buy your copy already.

00:22:56:19 - 00:23:24:16
Kevin Eikenberry
We'll get to that in a second and we'll give you a chance to figure out how to do that. But you have this whole piece about a help pyramid and how we do all that. I'm going to skip that because what I want to do is you end with five traps. The traps that we might fall into on unknowingly and the traps that all of us would recognize in others, but might not recognize in ourselves.

00:23:24:18 - 00:23:41:22
Kevin Eikenberry
And so I got all five of them here that I can drop on the screen. I'm going to ask you to say which ones your favorite. And by my favorite, I don't mean the one you like the most, but maybe the one that you think shows up most, or that just you feel like talking about today.

00:23:41:23 - 00:24:07:04
Bob Sutton
Well, I think the one the one I would pick is called addition sickness. And the reason I would pick addition sickness is it says such a fundamental challenge for us as humans in our brains and also in our organizations, the incentive systems we have. So so at the human level and I'll have yes, I'll plug my friend lady class writing class.

00:24:07:06 - 00:24:33:16
Bob Sutton
You wrote this book, Subtract rodents. Look, I've got a coffee stain right in the middle of this book. And and so. So lighting is colleagues at University of Virginia showed that the standard human solution, the default human solution to solving any problem is just to add more complexity, whether it's fixing a Lego model, fixing a university, improving a recipe our to fall problem solving approach is addition.

00:24:33:18 - 00:24:37:21
Bob Sutton
So that's one problem that's just and if you think about it, I say since you're.

00:24:38:02 - 00:24:45:13
Kevin Eikenberry
Talking about books, yeah, that's a major problem with people that like like you and I that write books.

00:24:45:15 - 00:24:51:23
Bob Sutton
When you're surrounded with these things, don't ask me what percentage I read. So it's up, it goes.

00:24:52:02 - 00:24:56:04
Kevin Eikenberry
It's not what happens. Like they get longer, they don't get shorter.

00:24:56:06 - 00:25:27:01
Bob Sutton
they don't. And in fact, at least when this book Scaling Up Excellence, when it got reviewed in the Financial Times very positively, you know how the English are, Andrew Hill said For a book that talks about cognitive load, it puts too much cognitive load on the readers. So yeah, yes, I have that challenge too. But the the other problem is, is that in addition to this human tendency, many organizations have a tendency to reward people who add stuff rather than subtract stuff.

00:25:27:01 - 00:25:46:02
Bob Sutton
So it could be a new initiative of one of my favorite or least favorite, depending on how you describe it. Incentives is that is that most organizations, the more people who report to you, the more you get paid. So you end up with a fiefdom. And this is a problem at Google right now. It's a problem at Stanford.

00:25:46:02 - 00:26:21:07
Bob Sutton
Where I work is is that you create this incentive and then and then when you hire a bunch of administrators, what do they do? They add load on each other and on people in the front lines. So, so, so so there's this addition sickness. So that's the bad news. The good news and this comes from Lady Klotz at our research and from our more informal research is that when you trigger this mindset and give people tools to do subtraction, we call it treating them thinking like an editor in chief is is that which we saw from our friend Michael Deering, a venture capitalist.

00:26:21:09 - 00:26:50:14
Bob Sutton
And then lots of good things can happen. And then and then we have lots of examples of how you would do a good riddance review or sludge review to figure out what's getting in the way, and then also some tools for subtraction. And and so so to me, if I was going to pick one of the most interesting and important one is just making aware of this bias towards addition and then giving people both the mindset and the tools to begin subtracting.

00:26:50:14 - 00:26:56:01
Bob Sutton
That's that's and I'm not talking about laying off people, by the way. I'm talking about getting rid of burdens.

00:26:56:03 - 00:27:18:16
Kevin Eikenberry
100%. I agree with you on that. I'm just going to we are not going to talk about any more of them, but I'm just going to tell all of you. I mean, if at this point in listening to this conversation, you don't get and if you've never read any of Bob's work, if you don't get the fact that this this isn't isn't not only thought provoking, but fun to read, let me give you the other four traps just so you have a clue.

00:27:18:20 - 00:27:44:03
Kevin Eikenberry
They are oblivious leaders, broken connections, jargon, monoxide. That's my personal favorite. And fast and frenzied. So it's it's good stuff. And like, you don't even have to read them to know what he means by most of those, like carbon monoxide. We know what that means. So I'm going to shift gears, Bob. I'm going actually will actually ask you one more question.

00:27:44:04 - 00:28:10:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Sure. Before we going to go into the final part of the conversation. So one of the things that's been happening a lot in what will, let's call it post pandemic is all of the discussion about bringing people back to the office. What's your take about all that as it relates to friction? Like there's all sorts of things we could say about whether that's right, whether that's wrong, why it's good, whether it's bad and all of that.

00:28:10:07 - 00:28:17:19
Kevin Eikenberry
But I'm just curious what connection you would make to all of those efforts about where and when people are working and how it relates to friction.

00:28:17:19 - 00:28:35:09
Bob Sutton
Well, so so when it comes to the return to work stuff, my first my perspective is I'm trying to be nonideological because everybody from Jamie Dimon to the people who say that we should never go back to the office again, I think there are two ideological. And so I would I'm lucky to have a colleague.

00:28:35:11 - 00:28:37:06
Kevin Eikenberry
Long spectrum, one spectrum.

00:28:37:12 - 00:29:00:00
Bob Sutton
Yeah. And people did not listen to Jamie Dimon. They didn't come in anyways. Is is that so? I have a cognate Nick Blum, who's in the economics department. He has a huge data set. He's been setting this problem forever and hundreds of thousands of people in his data set. And what it looks like is about half the population have jobs where they it's possible for them to work from home.

00:29:00:02 - 00:29:11:18
Bob Sutton
I mean, so people who work at McDonald's or are surgeons, they they can't do it remotely very well. So so although even in McDonald's, they figured out how to make some of the jobs remote.

00:29:11:20 - 00:29:15:03
Kevin Eikenberry
So but working in a warehouse, driving a truck, we can go right on down the.

00:29:15:03 - 00:29:42:21
Bob Sutton
Line, right? Yeah. Yeah. We yeah. So there's all sorts of things that have to. So for the other 50%, what it looks like is that is that if you just force everybody to go to work five days a week or you just go completely remote, those are liar solutions, although it's kind of cool in there are fully remote organizations that don't have a headquarters that work quite well.

00:29:43:03 - 00:29:57:23
Bob Sutton
On average, it looks like sort of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is probably about right and people will be less productive on those days because people are less productive in the office. But then that takes care of the social glue. So, so so.

00:29:58:01 - 00:30:01:10
Kevin Eikenberry
We can have a whole other show on what productive means in that context.

00:30:01:10 - 00:30:03:18
Bob Sutton
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because there's more.

00:30:03:18 - 00:30:04:22
Kevin Eikenberry
To it than just that.

00:30:04:22 - 00:30:30:08
Bob Sutton
But for non they're more productive for non interdependent work, let's just say, or non creative non-emotional bonding work. So, so so so that's sort of where I'm at. But but forcing people to go to work five days a week, it looks like that ship has sailed for many occupations. And one of the reasons is that you won't be able to recruit or keep the best people.

00:30:30:08 - 00:30:52:07
Bob Sutton
In fact, there's a company that I'm working right now with that has a world class arrow, and the reason that she is looking for another job and has a more lucrative got a more lucrative job offer. But she got pissed because she's a CEO of a public company. They were forced to come into the office five days a week and she thought it was completely pointless.

00:30:52:07 - 00:31:10:08
Bob Sutton
So she started looking for a job. So. So you got it. So you got to sort of be careful with this. And yes, of course, there's all the friction of traveling of of, you know, get taking a shower and get all the stuff that we know that you have to do to get ready to go into keeping gas in your car and all that sort of stuff.

00:31:10:10 - 00:31:34:09
Bob Sutton
So so those are all sort of sorts of friction. And just one comment I also would make, which is evidence based, but something that really annoys me is that is that one of the reasons that many people are in the kind of jobs where they work in the office figured out how bad it was, was there was this thing called the open office movement that occurred in the years running up to the pandemic.

00:31:34:11 - 00:31:50:10
Bob Sutton
And and I just remember talking to architects, even at Stanford, you got to be like Google and Facebook. And I said, I have friends who work at Google and Facebook. If they need to get something done, they either find a conference room or stay at home and work if they're if they're writing code or having a sensitive meeting, they're always fighting for the conference rooms.

00:31:50:11 - 00:32:11:07
Bob Sutton
So so in all the evidence is that the open office is less productive, less collaborative, more likely to spread diseases because you don't have walls, all these sort of problems. And then people are upset because their employees aren't going back to an open office, which which sucks for the kind of work they do. So which which is another source of another source of friction.

00:32:11:12 - 00:32:39:14
Bob Sutton
So you can't get your work done because of the burdens that openoffice places on you. So so that's kind of with the return to work. I'm trying to stay in the middle of the spectrum and, and, and one thing it is interesting for people to know that that there are some organizations that are completely virtual. So there's an organization I'm an advisor to called camaraderie that there was it was there's no headquarters there's about 30 people who work all over the world.

00:32:39:18 - 00:32:43:06
Bob Sutton
And there are organizations like that, and they do function.

00:32:43:08 - 00:33:06:04
Kevin Eikenberry
We are we are nearly that and have been for a long time, not set, but very close to that. And so, yeah, so but I think the right answer is what's the work rather than what does someone what that's the question like what you know there's the tension between getting the right work done and meeting the needs of the people that are doing the work.

00:33:06:04 - 00:33:18:04
Kevin Eikenberry
And if we can figure that out, rather than getting on either end of that spectrum that you and I were talking about earlier, we had a better shot of success and that ends up looking like two or three days one way or the other, right? Whatever that ends up being for you.

00:33:18:06 - 00:33:45:01
Bob Sutton
I love that. The work, the other thing, dear bosses, and I think that Jamie Dimon won't admit it, but I think he learned this is that is that when you order people to do something and they don't do it. In the words of my late colleague Jim March, resistance to change often protects you from folly as an executive, that there's a lot of information in this idea of resistance to change being, the stupid people won't do what we're telling them to do.

00:33:45:03 - 00:33:51:22
Bob Sutton
Very often it's just information that, maybe what you're doing or how you're doing, it needs to be changed. As a senior leader.

00:33:51:23 - 00:34:06:20
Kevin Eikenberry
There is wisdom in the crowd, so. So I have a couple of final questions for you, Bob, before we finish. And one of them is this Outside of all the stuff we've been talking about, although it's pretty clear that you enjoy your work, what do you do for fun?

00:34:06:22 - 00:34:26:16
Bob Sutton
Well, so go for bike rides. Go for hikes in the Sierras with my wife. My my wife is she was a CEO of the Girl Scouts of Northern California for 15 years. She's a lawyer before that. And and so she really knows all the great places to hike. So she drags me up the mountains in the Sierras. I can almost keep up with her.

00:34:26:18 - 00:34:38:18
Bob Sutton
And I ride my bike a lot. And then lately we've been going now with the pandemic's over there's a we've been going to a lot of live music and comedy shows because we kind of miss that. So that's some of the stuff that we do also.

00:34:38:23 - 00:34:57:15
Kevin Eikenberry
And like me, you got books all around you. I actually that's one of the ways I feel like I'm blessed is when they're little better, when there are books around me. So and you've mentioned as many books during this conversation as any any guest has ever done. And by the way, we'll have all those everybody in the show for you.

00:34:57:17 - 00:35:00:15
Kevin Eikenberry
But what are you reading right now, Bob?

00:35:00:17 - 00:35:27:21
Bob Sutton
Well, so the book I keep going back to is I got the book Hack Your Bureaucracy. Okay, So this is this is by Maureen and it's a Nick Sinai. Now, they're really interesting because both of them were senior government officials in the Obama administration and they both of them, and they're still working on this. They did all this stuff to get rid of destructive friction in large bureaucracies.

00:35:27:23 - 00:36:03:04
Bob Sutton
And and it's so technique, it's so tangible in terms of specific things that you can do no matter where you are in an organization, to to make bureaucracies work better. And one thing that one song they sing I really like is that this idea that bureaucracy is terrible. It maybe it is it is a pejorative word. But the way I was taught as an organizational theorist, what bureaucracy means is it means you have a hierarchy, it means you have specialized roles in and functions and you have rules.

00:36:03:10 - 00:36:27:03
Bob Sutton
And I have no idea how to run an organization, even an organization with 15 people without having those characteristics. And the question is, is it a good bureaucracy or a bad bureaucracy? And then they talk about all these things that that they have done in their leadership roles and now as consultants to help organizations get rid of destruction, friction, destructive friction.

00:36:27:03 - 00:36:27:21
Bob Sutton
So hack your.

00:36:27:23 - 00:36:46:02
Kevin Eikenberry
Bureaucracy that that book has been featured on the show. We'll have that in the show. Yeah. All right. Well, I was already thinking that when I thought about related podcasts, which we try to do, that would definitely be one related here. Hack your bureaucracy. And we're and so, Bob, here's the chance. What do we need to know? Like, where do you want to point people?

00:36:46:03 - 00:36:52:01
Kevin Eikenberry
What what do you need people to know? How can they learn more about you and your work and this great The Friction project? Where do you employ people?

00:36:52:06 - 00:37:13:02
Bob Sutton
Well, probably the best place is either Bob Sutton dot net, which is my website, or just on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I still do some stuff on Twitter, but Twitter is getting less fun, or I guess we're supposed to call it X now. And so, so LinkedIn is another good place. But Bob Sutton Dot Net is probably the best place to go.

00:37:13:04 - 00:37:33:00
Kevin Eikenberry
Bob Sutton Dot net where you can learn about this book and all of the others. So Bob, before we wrap up, I've got a question that I ask everybody every week. If you've been with me before, you know, I'm going to ask you now what what are you going to do? Maybe you're going to think about the idea of of addition sickness.

00:37:33:00 - 00:37:56:20
Kevin Eikenberry
Maybe you're going to think a little bit about what role you can play regardless of where you sit in the organization. Maybe you're going to try to do what you can to reduce the frustration factory in your organizing. Maybe you're recognizing that friction isn't all bad, just like bureaucracy doesn't necessarily have to be bad. And you need and you need to think a little bit more about what should we make harder and what should we make easier.

00:37:56:22 - 00:38:13:16
Kevin Eikenberry
I don't know what the right answer is for all of you, but I do know that if you don't if you just take this in and say that was interesting, and even if you just decided to go by the book, that this time would have been better spent for you in the long term, if you take some action on what you have learned, I hope you'll do that.

00:38:13:16 - 00:38:15:06
Kevin Eikenberry
And Bob, thanks so much for being here.

00:38:15:06 - 00:38:23:03
Bob Sutton
It was very much I was so fun to talk to you. Gather somebody said that they love our energy and I love your energy. It's fabulous.

00:38:23:05 - 00:38:39:17
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, thank you. And everybody, if you like this one, you need to come back next week because we're going to be back again next week. Not live. I'm not going to be live for a while as I'm finishing the man's manuscript for my next book. But every week the podcast will come out and so come back next week for another episode of The Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

00:38:39:18 - 00:38:40:08
Kevin Eikenberry
Thanks, everybody.