Bob Sutton: Mastering Organizational Friction for Better Leadership

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
We got to go backwards in time a little bit. We got to catch up. So explain how many took the ARSE test, the asshole test?
Bob Sutton:
The Asshole Rating Self-Exam is a test. Actually it's in my best-selling book, The No Asshole Rule, it was not called the Asshole 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?
Guy Kawasaki:
I was a law student for two weeks. Most people take twenty years to figure out they hate law, I did it in two weeks. That's how smart I am.
Bob Sutton:
She was running a law firm with about 1,000 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, and she wrote in about ten 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 ARSE test at Guy Kawasaki. And 613,000 people had completed it last time I looked which was in 2023.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, my.
Bob Sutton:
Thanks, Guy. Beautiful PR. You were a genius. And I'm not sure that book would've been a bestseller without you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know about that.
Bob Sutton:
You were very helpful at just the right time.
Guy Kawasaki:
Thank you for all the royalty you've been sending me over the years.
Bob Sutton:
Yeah, you're welcome.
Guy Kawasaki:
It helped me pay for the Sacred Heart tuition.
Bob Sutton:
I had to pay some Sacred Heart tuition too. Ouch.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm so glad my kids went to Cal State schools. I started saving money when they graduated high school. Have you ever done any statistical analysis and figured out what the mean and average score of the ARSE test was or?
Bob Sutton:
It's not a scientific test.
Guy Kawasaki:
You mean like election polling?
Bob Sutton:
Yeah, it's probably worse than election polling, to be honest. But the mean is about eight, so that means that you're occasionally an asshole. But who knows what the mean uses? 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. He got a twelve out of twenty-four. Which is pretty high actually, in my biased opinion. So it can be used for other purposes.
Guy Kawasaki:
With your current view of the world, do you think assholeness is on the rise or decline?
Bob Sutton:
So there's two views of this and 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. To use a 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. Psychologists are fantastic at turning people into assholes. You just put them in a hurry, you have them be sleep-deprived. Being around is one of the best way to act like an asshole. 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'll give you an interesting example. One of my colleagues, Katie DeCelles, 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 planes 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 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 and 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that being a certified mission-driven asshole is okay? I'm referring specifically to Steve Jobs.
Bob Sutton:
So let's talk, you worked for Steve Jobs and I did not. Especially in my second asshole book, who knows, I shouldn't 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 twenty-eight years, met with Steve every week for twenty-seven, twenty-eight years. And here's Ed's perspective. So another believe it or not, but Ed's perspective is that the Steve Jobs who you might've worked with, you worked with him before he was kicked out of the kingdom, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
Before and after.
Bob Sutton:
Oh, 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 if that's accurate. And there's also another take on this.
This one says 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 asshole-y culture and it was just an investment for him. It wasn't like his life like Apple was like his life.
And 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 supportive 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 rich. So I don't know which is true, but those are different stories that I tend to hear. And then let's face it, there are people who are assholes, who do succeed. We know this.
Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe Elon Musk will get fired from Tesla and come back a better person.
Bob Sutton:
Elon Musk is not a good person. Maybe he was. Oh, gosh.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, better person.
Bob Sutton:
A less bad person.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, less bad person. All right, so we covered the background here now.
Bob Sutton:
That's all the bad we cut up.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have to tell you this, I love a good acronym. And I spent a long time coming up with ARSE, right? Although with ChatGPT, we could come up with that in five seconds. So I'm reading your book and I see GROSS, Get Rid of Stupid Shit. And I saw that, I said, "Oh my God, that's better than ARSE."
Bob Sutton:
No, I think ARSE is pretty good. Anyway. So you want me to talk about it.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, you can talk about GROSS.
Bob Sutton:
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. Hawaii, you know something about Hawaii. Aren't you spending some time in Hawaii these days?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, absolutely.
Bob Sutton:
We just got back from Kauai just two days ago. Beautiful place. What a gorgeous place.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you flew in first-class and pissed off all the coach people.
Bob Sutton:
First class on the way there, coach on the way back. The flight attendants were awesome, by the way. I got to say, I've complained about United, but the flight attendants were awesome on that flight.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, but was it a Boeing plane that should have been passed through quality control?
Bob Sutton:
It was a Boeing plane actually, I was a little nervous. Actually, a 737 MAX, so how about that?
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, my God.
Bob Sutton:
But we lived. 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 of all this stuff that people had to spend all their time 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 eighty-seven. 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, and at least according to their calculations, approximately 1,700 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. You know how capitalism works.
Guy Kawasaki:
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.
Bob Sutton:
And you're still filling out the forms. So that's the same expense. Honestly as 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. Also, this is one of the other things that I like to look out for in Silicon Valley companies.
Oh, and my university, Stanford also suffers from this by the way, which is spending money is a substitute for thinking. So where this happens is 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, 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 a rock?
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So I think bad friction is kind of obvious, you already mentioned a great example. But what is good friction?
Bob Sutton:
To your point, when we started the book, it was anything that's hard to do, the frictionless organization. We want everything to be really easy. But then along the way we figured out that somethings 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 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 fought 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.
And to give you a contrary example, so I've got two students that I 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, it was leaking and everything.
So they have reinvented the tampon, they claim after eighty years that they finally reinvented the product. And they got FDA approval, they got five million dollars in venture capital. And in the name of full disclosure, I have invested 25,000 dollars in the company, and I think it might be the first venture I've ever invested in, to be honest. I'm not a venture capitalist 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 and difficult.
Guy Kawasaki:
Boeing, Boeing. Talk about Boeing.
Bob Sutton:
Oh, Boeing. This is the classic case that to do things right, sometimes you have to 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. Have you seen this book, Remarkable People? Have you seen this book?
My copy came with socks. Most people don't come with socks and a headphone though. I should be wearing the socks. Really cool socks. And my wife looked at me and she said, "Oh, 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 Teresa Mable from Harvard Business School? Seems like somebody you might've tripped over.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, I don't know who she is.
Bob Sutton:
Teresa has been studying creativity for fifty 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're not funny. They may be other things, they're 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 fifteen or twenty of them for his set or something like that.
So creativity isn't efficient. 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'm just thinking of you at this stage of your life and that surfing, which I admire you with the surfing so much. It's just amazing how late in life you started, how into it you are.
Guy Kawasaki:
Bob, just in the spirit of transparency, I rescheduled this interview because I wanted to surf.
Bob Sutton:
I said that to my wife, "I bet he's surfing." Hooray for you. All right. Where'd you go surfing?
Guy Kawasaki:
Santa Cruz.
Bob Sutton:
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 that the waves are good and you had a nice ride, actually. There's this amazing research which we just started getting into with 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 got to 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 got to 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 enjoy people and celebrate. And one of our mutual friends, David Kelley, of IDEO fame. Back in the nineties, I hung out at IDEO a lot. And that's one thing David was always so good about, which was 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 both seventy, at this point in my life that savoring sounds like a pretty good deal actually.
Guy Kawasaki:
You also brought in your book, The IKEA Effect, right? Which is savoring too.
Bob Sutton:
Savoring is strategic, thus 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 say, a buck fifty or something. And then they'd have them assemble the box and then they'd say, how much would 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 this must be worth it, I'm suffering.
Guy Kawasaki:
We actually had Mike Norton on this week's episode of the podcast. So yeah, we're familiar with the concept.
Bob Sutton:
That's his research.
Guy Kawasaki:
Listen, as I was reading your book, it was 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'll give you a theoretical example because I struggle with the 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 watering, no more mowing, no more all that. But you could also say that a regular lawn increases good friction because you're outdoors, you're exercising, you're interacting with your neighbors, but then you've got to use the gas lawnmower that creates pollution. What is AstroTurf? Good friction or bad friction?
Bob Sutton:
Honestly, this is a complete value judgment. I would say that some things that are low friction are just bad taste. And if your friends have bad taste and low friction, that's just fine. You know what 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 on that it's like, "Why doesn't he just take caffeine pills or something?" 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? So anyways, I would just stick with what is it? Low friction, bad taste.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Could you make the case that the postal servers, Pony Express, telephone, telegraph, email, text messaging, Zoom, all remove too much friction?
Bob Sutton:
All remove too much friction. Why do you say that?
Guy Kawasaki:
Because all of those things meant no more face-to-face interaction.
Bob Sutton:
We're talking about a situation, and now the same thing is 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, and 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm a senior citizen, I'm not lonely.
Bob Sutton:
Yeah, me neither. In fact, I wish I was a little more lonely, sometimes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Less friction.
Bob Sutton:
I just 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. And we just fact checked this, they start this in one store, and they've scaled it to 225 of their stores.
And the idea is you're getting in knowing it's sort of 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 want to get in and out in fifteen minutes. That's not what the goal is.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. That is an interesting concept, man. I got to 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."
Bob Sutton:
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 or designers, is they figure out how to use good friction to get rid of bad friction. So we've been bashing Google, so I'll say something good about Google. You may know Laszlo Bock. Maybe have Laszlo on your show. Show his book, Work Rules!. Great guy. He was basically head of HR or people operations, whatever they call it at 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 ten, fifteen, twenty 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 I remember doing the fact checking with him ten, twelve, fifteen times. He said twenty-five times. Sometimes you get interviewed for a job twenty-five times and you don't get the offer; this is a good way to waste a lot of effort.
Anyway, so he came up with this 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 excess of interviews disappeared almost immediately.
And 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. 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. So what you up having in organizations is, and they call this the credit card problem, is just zillions of different kinds of software and that 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 of 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 fifteen different questions and finally, no, I want to get out of. No, I want get out of. 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 weaponized to make it impossible for us to get rid of software and gym memberships, things like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
When I read that example, it brought to mind something that I just happened to meet last week. I quit Mailchimp, I deleted my Mailchimp account. And it was in five 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."
Bob Sutton:
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, including Patty McCord who was head of HR there for years, first fourteen 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 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow, I never thought of that, but 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.
Bob Sutton:
Also, the other thing Patty said about making it easy to quit, is to come back, that you're not going to get in a roach motel that you can quit again. Not to call out one of my daughters, but I got a daughter. I think you might've 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 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 from Heria. Literally, she's a shoe girl.
Guy Kawasaki:
Only five pairs?
Bob Sutton:
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. I think when I'm ninety and my kids are fifty, they're still going to be on the family Amazon account. That's the same thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
I loved your example. We're going all over the map in this interview.
Bob Sutton:
I'm sorry.
Guy Kawasaki:
I love your example about how much TSA Pre has helped people. That is so true.
Bob Sutton:
Yeah, let's talk about that because TSA Pre is an example of something that has made all of our lives easier. 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 two and a half million Michiganders filled out a year to get healthcare, to get food stamps, things like that. Longest benefits form in the United States, 1000 questions. One question was, when was your child conceived? This was 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, you have a lot to comply to. Now there's a form that's 80 percent shorter that's filled out by two and a half million Michiganders. So there is hope. And now people don't seem to believe us, but the California DMV is actually getting a little bit better.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, I think it's much better.
Bob Sutton:
I'm glad to hear that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Absolutely agree. 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 get your number before you leave for the office, is amazing.
Bob Sutton:
Because I don't want to overstate it. 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, and 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, I agree.
Bob Sutton:
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 my friends at Google.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, we agree on that.
Bob Sutton:
Good.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let's say people are listening to this and they're saying, okay, enough with the stories, boys. Just tell me, how do I add good friction and how do I remove bad friction? What's the tactics?
Bob Sutton:
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, there 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 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 use 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 is we said, what should you get rid of? And sometimes it's just BS, but other times they actually make progress.
And just one little example, I was working with a pharmaceutical company and the general counsel head lawyer, he said, I'm counting, this in the middle of playing the subtraction game, what you get rid of. We have eighty 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 sixty. 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 healthcare, 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, your language basically.
Guy Kawasaki:
You opened the door just now. So I have as one of my questions here, that in the book, it's this example of this vice provost of Stanford send out an email 1,300 words and 7,300 word attachment.
Bob Sutton:
Attachment.
Guy Kawasaki:
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've been ten times better?
Bob Sutton:
She. Yes. And just to be clear, so this was an email that was sent out to all 2,000 tenure-track faculty, inviting us to spend a Saturday, a full Saturday brainstorming on Zoom about the new Doerr sustainability school. So it was just like, "Please give us your time, you're sitting at home during the pandemic." And I did immediately forward the email to her boss and suggest that this was not good management. But yes, if that person had put it in ChatGPT, it would've been much shorter.
And there are some great uses of ChatGPT 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 twelfth grade reading level, and it was three pages long and they said, 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.
ChatGPT 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 editing tool rather than an addition tool, it could help us.
Guy Kawasaki:
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'll all come out the other and it'll be shorter and better.
Bob Sutton:
So I would not be surprised if that already exists. There's a woman named Clara Shih who is one of my 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So now let's talk about friction again and how hard or easy should it be for a party to change their presidential candidate?
Bob Sutton:
I don't mean to be political, but I will be political. Yes, I think that it should be easy. 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 mensch. So the number of messages we exchanged being concerned about Joe Biden's behavior is unbelievable.
But Adam being Adam, 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 who 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so now what companies are in the Sutton hall of friction fame for removing friction in an outstanding way?
Bob Sutton:
Removing friction? 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 disciplined about being frugal but also being customer focused. And 2014, I gave a speech up there, which of course was unpaid, which was 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 times 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 levels of hierarchy from the store manager to the CEO.
And if I compare that, let's say to what is it, Meta/Facebook, which has, I think they're trying to reduce them now they have something like twelve a while ago. And so those are some 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 fifty direct reports, which according to some of my other work, it should be impossible for a CEO to have fifty direct reports and do their job. But if you trust them completely and you don't micromanage them completely, maybe it's possible. So maybe my theory about organizational design is wrong.
And so I was talking to a woman just two weeks ago, who's working at NVIDIA, she was an accountant, she's been working there for about fifteen 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 Dimon 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 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 closely and monitoring them really closely, and always being worried about the lawsuit, and they’re going to do something wrong.
And then in organizations like that, when you 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So now who's in the Sutton hall of friction shame?
Bob Sutton:
Hall of Shame? I hate to say it, but I know too much about it. 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. So when I had trouble getting through to Comcast, my mother had passed away and was dealing with a bunch of complicated issues for a 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 a personal message and says, "I'll get you to someone." So three days later, I'm on 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's so screwed up is that 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.
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 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 list.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have had the same experience with Verizon and I happened to know someone on the board of directors who just made everything magically happen for me.
Bob Sutton:
See?
Guy Kawasaki:
But as this was happening, I was thinking, well, what if you don't know somebody on the board of directors of Verizon? This is just wrong. And then I also know, Bob, 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's the only argument I can make for why you want a lot of followers and to stay on Twitter.
Bob Sutton:
Now, the one place where it may not help, by the way, healthcare. The problem with healthcare in the US, 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 healthcare 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 attacks in the book, and they just can't believe how difficult it is to navigate the system, even though they've been doctors for thirty years. And they thought that they were all powerful because they had control over the little domain, but the healthcare 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, fourteen 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 in the US.
Guy Kawasaki:
We covered a gamut of good friction, bad friction, assholes, mission driven assholes.
Bob Sutton:
Assholes.
Guy Kawasaki:
What else do you want to talk about?
Bob Sutton:
Joe Biden.
Guy Kawasaki:
What do you want people to remember from Bob Sutton?
Bob Sutton:
Well first of all, I have 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 realized 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Bob, I got to agree with you, man. I tell you, most of the people I meet in all my talks and all my visits and all that, they may work in the worst organization, I think from the outside. But when you meet, it's not them. They're trying. It's systems and other things. It's not because they're incompetent or lazy or stupid.
Bob Sutton:
Yeah. And I would especially point out to civil servants. So my friends who did the work with the state of Michigan, that reduced this benefit form by 80 percent, that was filled out by two and a half million people, one of them, Adam Seltzer, a Stanford grad, and he said, "I thought as I 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."
Guy Kawasaki:
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 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 Nuismer, our researcher. Madisun Nuismer, producer and co-author with me in the book, Think Remarkable. And then we have Luis Magaña, Fallon Yates, and Alexis Nishimura.
And last but not least, is our amazing sound design team, that would be Jeff Sieh 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.