Don't Be a Jerk
"The No A**hole Rule” and When The Rule Can Be Broken | Bob Sutton @ Stanford
Bob Sutton has spent twenty years being asked to prove that decency pays. He can do it: the productivity data, the health data, the turnover math, all of it. He mostly refuses to. His actual argument is harder to shrug off. Sutton is a Stanford professor emeritus who got the idea for the most famous management book with a swear word in its title from his father, at the San Diego Zoo, when he was about four years old. He also once flew across the country for heart surgery, past a hospital two miles from his house, in part because the Cleveland Clinic's CEO told him something Stanford's wouldn't: you reward a**hole heart surgeons, and I fire them. Healey and Bob get into the moral case, the business case, and the uncomfortable middle where jerks really do win. It's the rare conversation about workplace behavior that never once sounds like an HR training. In this episode: - Why Sutton has given up arguing decency on ROI, and what he says instead - The one sentence that tells you everything about a company's culture - The hidden-tape-recorder study on coaches who lose it at halftime, and why the nice ones get results - How to tell whether you're the difficult person in the room - Why calling someone a jerk is the most reliable way to turn them into one - What Google did to cut interviews from 25 rounds to four - The Kurt Vonnegut poem Sutton wrote a letter to get permission to use, and the postcard he got back Subscribe for new episodes of ‘Don’t Be a Jerk’ every week. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Find Bob at bobsutton.net or on LinkedIn.
