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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. When you're trying to invent a new product, or write a screenplay, or come up with a new way to do something at work, it's fun to focus on the possibilities. It's enjoyable to have brainstorming sessions, throw ideas up on a whiteboard, daydream. Very often, however, these brainstorming sessions don't lead to anything tangible. Teams fill up walls with sticky notes about creative possibilities and suggestions for improvement,
but none of them are actually implemented. If you've been part of an organization that does this, you might get the sneaking suspicion that you are not engaged in innovation, but in what some researchers call innovation theater. This is not to say that ideas are unimportant, but it is to underscore that when it comes to building something new, what really matters is execution. For the last few weeks, we've been exploring the science of innovation.
We've examined how successful entrepreneurs are great at something called effectuation. We've looked at our attitudes about the role of genius in success and how cultures of genius can undermine our growth. If you missed those episodes, I strongly recommend you listen to them in this podcast feed. Today, in the latest installment of our Innovation 2.0 series, we explore the science of execution. How to move from innovation theater to actual innovation this week on Hidden Brain.
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It's your journey. It all starts with a yes.
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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. We all have them. Small frustrations that make our lives just a little bit more difficult. Like standing in a long line at the grocery store or getting too many emails.
not being able to reach a customer service rep when you have a problem. At Stanford University, psychologist Bob Sutton studies these frustrations, the annoying bureaucracies we encounter when dealing with companies, institutions, and organizations. Bob Sutton, welcome to Hidden Brain. Oh, Shankar, it's great to be here. I'm happy to talk to you.
I want to start with a personal story that I think many of our listeners can relate to, Bob. It involves a conflict that you had with your cable provider. Tell me the story of what happened. Well, I mean, there's a sad part. So my mother passed away, but then her partner was still living in the house. And there was all these problems that we could not have cable TV for him.
And I kept calling them. They claimed they'd fix it. I would go through these phone trees over and over and over again. It was just driving me absolutely – and all the stress and grief of my mother's death that I was dealing with. This was a part of it. And after probably 10 different phone calls and phone trees and people making mistakes, I went home.
And I complained and I did it on Twitter, now X. And this person who is a board member found out about it and he said, I will help you. And then magically I got the VIP privilege line, one phone call, fixed immediately, all fees waived. And in fact, later on, about three weeks later, my son just wanted an upgrade up in San Francisco and I called them.
They came to his apartment for no charge. They didn't charge him for the new equipment. It was like we were moved from the regular person's experience to the VIP lounge. And we had the privilege to be protected from the inconveniences that the little people suffered from.
Bob had always been interested in how organizations run. So instead of simply reveling in his newfound VIP status, he looked into why the cable company was giving some customers the VIP treatment.
He discovered that the goal of this ultra-secret club was not about pleasing customers. It was meant to serve the boss class. When well-connected people called in favors or irate customers created trouble, having a VIP lounge to send them to bought executives peace and quiet. And I sort of compare that to, well, he's one of, this guy named Carl Liebert. He's been head of many companies. At one point, he was head of supply chain of Home Depot, right?
And there were all these problems at Home Depot. And he not only would go shopping anonymously, he would actually work the midnight shift with the workers loading and unloading boxes to try to figure out where the supply chain problems actually happened. And to me, there's a big difference between being in the VIP lounge and sort of being protected from the inconveniences, if you will.
Bob argues that one reason companies and organizations drop the ball when it comes to execution is that the leaders of companies are too far removed from the experiences of customers. But that is far from the only reason. Some organizations are so complex that getting different silos to talk to one another is next to impossible. He cites the work of Stanford researcher Melissa Valentine, who studied a cancer center.
And what her research found was that patients suffered from what she called the cancer tax, which means that when you have a relative who gets cancer, it's so hard to glue together all the different parts of the treatment that it falls to the patient. And so the cancer center she studied had excellent doctors, individual departments, but you need all these different services when you have somebody who has cancer. And one of my neighbors recently,
Her brother is a doctor, and their mother got cancer. And the doctor said, the fact that I'm a physician actually didn't help me that much navigating through the system because there's so much fragmentation and lack of communication between silos and occupations and so forth. So sometimes it's structural, too, and it's very difficult to overcome for anyone. One organization Bob studied revealed a problem that he calls executive magnification.
A lot of times senior executives complain there's resistance to change. When I come up with an idea, people push back against it. But all of us who are in hierarchies, whether we're baboons or humans, we tend to focus very heavily on the moves and actions and preferences of those in power. And it's just adaptive because those in power, they can give us rewards and punishments of all kinds.
And this was a new CEO and one of the first meetings he went to, and this is CEO of a Fortune 10 company, a very large company. And he gets to an early meeting and he just comments, where's the blueberry muffins?
And it was just an offhand comment. And then somebody put in his notes, you know, prefers blueberry muffins. And he couldn't figure out for years why every meeting he went to, there were huge piles of blueberry muffins. And imagine all these poor underlings just being really nervous because otherwise they'd have an unhappy CEO. Now, did the CEO actually want blueberry muffins at all these meetings?
No, maybe at that moment, but that wasn't particularly important to him. But it's a reminder for people who are in power that there's all sorts of psychological research about attention turns up the hierarchy. And so you've got to be careful. And even when you're sort of thinking out loud to say, I'm thinking out loud, I'm not asking you to do anything. And in a more sort of serious example, some 30 years ago, I did research with the 7-Eleven company.
So the then CEO, he walks into a 7-Eleven store and a clerk is rude to him. He comes back to the office and he kind of has a temper tantrum like about how unacceptable it is.
And some of his underlings say, oh, my goodness, we've got to do something about the courtesy in 7-Eleven stores. And they started all of these different contests, some of which I was involved in evaluating. And the idea was to provide incentives for every clerk in every 7-Eleven store to smile, establish eye contact, and to say thank you to every customer.
And they did all this analysis. And in the end, and this is included in some of the research I was involved in, we were able to show there was virtually no relationship between the courtesy and the 7-Eleven store and their sales. People want to get in and out quickly and they don't want a rude clerk. That's all they want. And after spending millions of dollars, including they had a thanks a million contest,
that the owner of one 7-Eleven store or manager, if they had perfect courtesy, they entered a drawing and somebody won a million dollars for the courtesy in their store. And this was just largely the effect of executive magnification. The CEO hadn't realized that this sort of crazy thing happened. As you can see, what customers and clients perceive as a badly run organization can be the result of many different internal forces.
Sometimes, managers want to ignore unpleasant feedback. At other times, companies become hyper-focused on one issue, like smiling at customers or making blueberry muffins available at every meeting when those things don't really matter. A few years ago, Bob wrote an entire book about another reason groups fail to execute on good ideas. The book's title has, shall we say, salty language.
For better or worse, in 2007, I published a book called The No *** Rule, which I thought was going to be my worst-selling book and has turned out to be my best-selling book. And the argument that that book makes is that when people leave others feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected, that it's actually bad for business. When people feel that way, they perform less well.
Their health is negatively affected. One of the key things is that they're not willing to go the extra mile. And there's large-scale studies, for example, in fast food chains that when you've got a nasty manager of a fast food chain, that people are more likely to steal, more likely to quit.
So if you have leaders throughout an organization who treat people with disrespect, that that ends up being a problem. We can talk about whether people who are jerks get ahead in some systems. That actually might be possible in some systems. But when you work for somebody who leaves you feeling that way, I think that the evidence is quite clear that it undermines the performance of the organization or team.
And there's also been evidence that suggests that even when you have one person on a team, even if the team is quite large, but you have one person on the team who really is a negative personality or a difficult person to work with or just an unpleasant person, that can damage the relationships and the camaraderie of the whole team.
Yeah. So, so the evidence in this is there's two reasons, at least one is there's a lot of evidence that negative emotions are more contagious than positive emotions in general. And then the other thing, which some studies show, and I think if you look at more anecdotal evidence, you'll see if you talk to a boss.
and say, who do you spend most of your time with? Very often they'll say, I spend 90% of my time dealing with the 10% who are most difficult. So that's the sort of uniform sort of issue that happens throughout organizations. So yeah, and it's funny because at one point I thought maybe it might be good to have maybe one low status jerk in a team or organization to show how not to behave.
but I've since come to the belief that they're so difficult that it's better to get rid of them, although it's pretty difficult, as I bet all your listeners can tell you. Yeah, I've been on many search committees for many positions, and I think increasingly many people say, you know, even when you have someone who's incredibly talented and smart, if this person is a truly unpleasant person, it's probably not worth it to bring them on the team.
Yeah, yeah. So one of the tests that I like to use, and if you look at a place like Microsoft, I believe they've had a transformation around this, is I ask them, if you are a superstar and a jerk, do you get ahead?
And there are some organizations, if you are a superstar and a jerk, under the old Microsoft, it was actually rewarded to try to push down fellow coworkers. And now the kind of people who get ahead at Microsoft, and they're quite explicit like this,
are the people who do good work and who help others along rather than stomp on them on the way to the top. And a little bit of competition, or even a lot of competition in the culture can be very useful, but the question is how you treat your coworkers can have a big effect. As Bob looked at these many disparate examples, he started to see that there was one common theme that connected all of them. It was the idea of friction. It might be helpful to explain this with an analogy.
Let's say you're an engineer designing a car. You want it to run as smoothly as possible. But this doesn't mean that you want to reduce friction in everything the car does. When a driver hits the brakes, friction is what makes the car stop. If a motorist yanks at the steering wheel and it spins around without any resistance, the car could twist out of control. At the same time, if there's too much friction in the wheels, the car won't move.
As an engineer, in other words, friction is essential to everything you design, but there are times you want to increase friction and times you need to decrease friction. The more Bob thought about it, the more he realized that friction works the same way in organizations.
The reason many people and companies fall down when it comes to executing on their dreams is that they have too much friction in places that need to run smoothly and too little friction in places that need to move slowly. When we come back, the science of friction and how you can use it to design your own life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. ♪
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Plus, T-Mobile is powering AI solutions so tractor supply team members can match shoppers with the products they need faster. This is enriching customer experience. Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. All of us encounter inconveniences as we deal with cable companies, schools, and governments. At Stanford University, psychologist Bob Sutton studies the organizational origins of these frustrations.
Along with Huggy Rao, Bob is co-author of The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Bob and Huggy argue that every organization, from corner convenience stores to international aid agencies, can be plagued by destructive friction.
Bob, I want to talk about a source of friction that we see in public policy all the time. You talk about a system in Michigan where residents were applying for government assistance but found it very difficult to do so. Tell me what was happening, Bob. So there's a class that I've been teaching for years with some colleagues that's called design leadership. And what we do is we take a pair of students and we link them to a company or a nonprofit and help them solve a little problem.
So, and usually these are young students, but every now and then we get somebody visit Stanford. So this guy, his name's Michael Brennan.
He was on leave from being the CEO of the United Way of Southeastern Michigan. First conversation I have, he pulls out this really long form and lays it out on the floor. It's 42 pages long. It has a thousand questions. Wow. And he says, this form is a form that is completed by more than 2 million Michigan residents a year, people who need help with food, with medical care, with financial assistance.
And it's just, it's a terrible form. And just to give you an example of how silly the form was, my favorite or least favorite question was, when was your child conceived?
Conceived, not born. Conceived, not born. And he starts a nonprofit called Sevilla in southeastern Michigan. And one of their first projects was to work on trying to fix this form. And they actually made a huge amount of change in this. And it's much easier for Michigan residents now to complete that form. Hmm.
I mean, I have to confess that every year when tax day rolls around, I feel exactly the same thing about the tax code, which is that I think of myself as a reasonably smart person, but I find it genuinely incomprehensible and almost deliberately so.
Oh, yes. And very often I think that happens that no individual who assembles those forms wants to do it to us. But every person wants to add their sort of little thing that makes them happy. So that's one of the problems there.
So I'm imagining when it comes to something like the tax code, you know, over time, someone somewhere has found that there's someone who cheats some aspect of the tax code. And so you say, let's add this other little wrinkle over here that prevents people from doing this. And if you do this sufficiently often over 100 years, you're going to end up with something incredibly complex and difficult to understand.
Yes, and one of the other problems is that in most systems, the people who want to take things away, there tends to be sort of one advocate for it. And one of the things that we focus on in organizational life is that people who lead more large and complex systems and make life difficult for all of us, those are the people who tend to get rewarded more.
not the people who take things away. Just as an example, in my own university and I suspect many other organizations in the world, a good way if you're a manager to get a raise is to build a larger and larger organization because the more people report to you, the more you deserve to get paid, at least according to human resources. And if your team gets cut in half, sometimes you get a pay cut too. So a lot of times there's just incentives to add complexity too.
You cite the example of someone who uses a wonderful phrase that I had never heard before, jargon monoxide. Tell me about that, Bob. Well, so I first heard this. There's a woman named Polly LeBair who's been around, was a management writer for years. And she visited my class maybe 20 years ago and she used the term jargon monoxide. And I've been sort of enamored with it ever since. And to us, it's hollow and confusing language.
And we dissect three or four different kinds of jargon monoxide. We talk about just bulls**t, just as language that means absolutely nothing. The other two kinds to me are more interesting. A second kind is which we call convoluted crap. This is stuff that could be simple, but...
But it's so complicated, it's impossible to understand it. And then perhaps my favorite one is jargon mishmash syndrome.
So this is where you have so many different sort of languages and terms that people can't understand what is going on. And there's some situations where a word or a term means so many things to so many different people, they don't know what it is. That's Danny Kahneman's definition of noise, is it's a random scatter of ideas.
It's not always too much friction that's the problem within organizations. Sometimes the cause of our frustrations is actually a lack of friction within organizations. One example that Bob cites is the creation of Google's smart glasses technology, known as Google Glass.
Well, so Google Glass, this is one of the famous stories in Google's history. It also might be God's way of telling you you have too much money when you do stuff like this, by the way. So what happened was, so there was a team that developed essentially a set of eyeglasses that had a camera and a computer involved in it. And it was a really cool sort of prototype device.
And Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, he saw the technology and he got so excited that he sort of ripped it out of the developers' hands and gave the technology to some of the most famous people in the world.
And then very quickly, all the technology reviews and all the people tried to use it had battery life problems. It actually had a whole bunch of reliability problems. Oh, it had privacy problems. That was another issue. And so they ended up sort of pulling it from the market. And the technology reviews, one in particular, was this is one of the worst technology projects.
products ever made. And to us, the reason that's a lesson, and especially this idea of people who are in power sometimes don't face enough friction. His team did try to tell him that they didn't think it was a very good idea.
but they kind of couldn't stop him because he had the power to rip it out of their hands and to put it into the marketplace. And there's also a sort of postscript to that, that many of the people who were involved in that project were very skilled technologists, just sort of quit in frustration. That is sort of a classic story of something that was done a little bit too quickly.
We've talked a little bit about the challenge of silos. You gave me the example of the hospital where you build a wonderful oncology department, but the oncology department doesn't talk to the hematology department, which doesn't talk to the internal medicine department. And if you're a patient, you in fact might have to interact with more than one department at the hospital, and it creates this very difficult navigational problem for patients.
But you also make the very interesting point that sometimes organizations also need to have teams function a little independently, because if you don't, if you bring everyone together too soon, you can end up with an echo chamber. When people communicate and reach consensus too early and too often,
You end up where, what is it? Everybody thinks the same. So nobody thinks very much. Yeah. And when you have independent, even competing units coming up with a solution to the problem, sometimes you come up with better solutions. And in the early days at Hewlett Packard, this is in the late 70s, early 80s, when they were in the printer business. One reason they dominated so well in the printer business is they had such decentralized businesses that
that there were actually three or four different Hewlett Packard divisions that had their own printer in the marketplace. Wow.
And although you can say, well, this was a very expensive market test. It was really dumb. But on the other hand, you did not have the problem of people having to have consensus. You had a real test and the best product sort of won in the marketplace. So to me, that is an example. Yes, there can be some inefficiency in this case, but you certainly don't have the groupthink problem.
You know, I was thinking about a study that I remember reading many years ago. I think this might have been Sam Summers at Tufts University, and he was interested in the criminal justice system. And he was looking at juries that had diverse pools of jurors versus juries that did not have diverse pools of jurors. And what he found very interestingly was that the more diverse the jury pool was,
the more it prompted multiple people on the jury to challenge one another and to disagree with one another. And that disagreement obviously produced friction. It was uncomfortable. It would have been easier if everyone agreed on everything from the first moment. But of course, as you can imagine, the decisions were actually much better as a result of that friction. Another example of where friction could come in useful.
I agree with that in having studied various elements of creativity for years. If you look at teams that are the most creative teams, they're teams that fight in an atmosphere of mutual respect. They know when to start fighting and they know when to stop fighting. A good example of this is Ed Catmull, who was president of Pixar. He would set up something that was called the Brain Trusts.
where all of the different people who made movies would review the dailies or the ideas for each other's films, and they'd engage in an argument in an atmosphere of mutual respect and it was understood that it was your job to be critical, but not to be cruel. So yes, to me, that's a hallmark of creative teams.
You also talk about how sometimes the longer we go through an experience, the more meaningful the experience becomes to us, which is a very interesting psychological idea where the more friction we have, the more engaged we might feel. So talk about that idea, Babu.
Well, this is – you know so much about psychology. It's ridiculous. This is a very old finding. This goes back to the 50s, the notion that labor leads to love. It's just that idea that when you put more of your heart and soul into something, it becomes more valuable to you independently of its actual value. Yeah, yeah.
You give a couple of examples in the book of people and organizations that slowed down and it really benefited them. One of the examples you talk about is the company Waze, which actually got a whole bunch of funding and could have grown very quickly. But tell me what was happening with Waze at the time. For those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with it, first tell us what Waze is.
So Waze is a navigation software that it's more social than other navigation software. And essentially you put in the address that you want to go to and it tells you where you're going to go. So what happened in the early days of Waze, this is about 2012 or so, Noam Barden, who is the CEO, was actually an Israeli-based company, but their primary market was in the United States.
And so they got about $30 million in Series B financing. And the venture capitalists who gave them the money wanted them to do two things, which are about going fast. One was to hire people, and the other thing was to do more product development. But the thing that Noam and his team figured out was that when people downloaded the software, a month later, none of them were using it. So there was a problem.
So what he did was he stopped the whole company, used sort of an automotive analogy, hit the brakes, and did both quantitative and qualitative analysis about why people aren't keeping our software and did no hiring and no product development.
And he made a list. He called it the MIT list, the most important thing list. And once they had that list, if you will, they hit the gas. They started hiring people and doing product development once they figured out what needed to be done. And this is very much out of Daniel Kahneman's stuff on Fast and Slow, that when you're in a cognitive minefield, you don't rush ahead. Sometimes it's better just to stand there and figure out what's going on instead of rushing ahead.
In public policy, Bob, it feels like, you know, there are often times when you want to do something as a leader. If you're a president or you're a member of Congress or a senator, you want to jump ahead and you want to, you know, pass laws, implement policies. But sometimes if you try and do that too quickly, you can find things backfiring on you because, in fact, people are not ready for the new law. They haven't been prepared for it. You haven't laid the groundwork for it.
Can you talk a little bit about this, that in some ways you might actually want to introduce friction as you're trying to solve important problems of public policy so that you can bring people along with you and not just impose ideas top down?
So I love that example. I think the example that for me resonates best there is the effort that was made by the state of Michigan to reduce a benefit form that was completed by 2.5 million people a year. And they cut it by 80%.
and made it much simpler. But what they did in the process was they didn't just sort of rush in and say, the current benefits form, which is 1,000 questions long and 42 pages long and has all these silly questions, it's just dumb and we're going to fix it.
First, what they did was they got the civil servants on board, the head of the agency. They brought him into a room and had him fill out the 42-page form. He got to page eight and couldn't go any further. This is a form required of millions of Michiganders. And then the other thing they did, which I thought was very important, was that they did develop a prototype. But then they spent about six months working with civil servants and lawyers, and they went through 1,700 pages of
of rules and regulations to come up with a form that was 80% shorter but still complied with the rules. And now people are filling it out much faster. There's fewer mistakes. There's fewer visits to the office because people are confused.
But to your point, there was the moments when they had to slow down and bring aboard the civil servants and government leaders. And they had to slow down to make sure that their new, simple, low-friction form fit the actual rules and regulations. Because otherwise they get mired in litigation, of course. Can you talk a moment about the idea of friction when it comes to bringing about change, both within organizations as well as within societies today?
When you think about many social movements that have brought about successful change, many of them have done so by actually introducing friction into the system. So if you think about the civil rights movement, for example, you might have marches and protests that basically make it hard for organizations or societies to function smoothly. And in some ways, introducing friction, throwing sand into the gears,
is designed to say, "There's something wrong with the way the gears are turning. Let's slow down and figure out what needs to be fixed." Well, I mean, that's interesting. I'm not a social movement theorist, but my co-author, Huggy Rao, is.
And he would argue that a lot of times when there's change in an organization or when there's change in a society, although this often can have negative side effects, that sort of forcing people to slow down and to think and to make things more difficult for them enables them to actually think. And, you know, a little bit of inconvenience for people, a little bit of struggle sometimes forces them to be more mindful about the challenges themselves.
that they face and are imposed on others. As we've seen, friction can hurt and friction can help. As with all aspects of human behavior, the correct question to ask is not whether friction is a good thing or a bad thing, but to ask when friction is good and how much is useful. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
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Just visit simplisafe.com slash brain. That's simplisafe.com slash brain. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantham. Bob Sutton is an organizational psychologist at Stanford University. He studies friction, the resistance that we encounter in our daily lives, and the organizational hoops we must jump through when we pay a utility bill or get a driver's license.
Friction is the inbox full of emails we comb through every morning and the meetings on our calendar that go nowhere, or being put on endless hold as we try to reach someone in customer service. When his mother passed away some years ago, Bob found himself mired in friction. Besides dealing with his grief, he discovered he had to deal with bureaucracy. For example, he needed to update her car registration. So one morning, he headed to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Knowing that the DMV had a reputation as a bureaucratic hellhole, he dreaded the visit. I got there at 7.30 in the morning without an appointment, and I had blocked off the entire day. And I was maybe 50th in line. A fellow walks up and down the line, asks each one of us why we're there, and says,
There were some people who didn't need to be there. For example, one fellow was there for a passport. They don't provide passports, so he said he should leave. He gave us forms, and then he sent me to the window I was supposed to go, so he was doing triage. And I was out of there by 8.15, and I was completely confused about how quickly and easily it happened.
And he was somebody, we'd call him somebody who was a trustee of others' time, a friction fixer, who I initially thought he just took it upon himself to do it. So we have since found out that there is a large scale effort to improve both the speed and emotional experience of going through the DMV.
You used a very interesting word a second ago, and the word was triage. Because, of course, when this person came out 15 minutes before the doors opened and basically said, let me send people to different places. This person actually, you know, is waiting for a passport. That's not the right. You can't get it at the DMV. This person needs to go counter number six. This person needs to fill out a form.
there's just a whole bunch of information and time that this person ended up saving by stepping out for 15 minutes. Because, of course, the person knows everything that you can get at the DMV, one person that knows everything. Can you talk about this idea? It's such a profound idea because I think many organizations don't have a person like that. When you go to a hospital, there's often no one actually playing triage that basically says, here's how you navigate our organization, because that's what this person was doing.
That's exactly what that person was doing. And that's one of our solutions. We talk about how friction fixers, yes, in an ideal world, they'll fix things on the team or the organization. But one of the hallmarks of people who are great at understanding what is available and what aren't, they're sort of tour guides through the system. Mm-hmm.
And we talk in the book about grease people and gunk people. And I'll name a name. In my department, management science and engineering, there's a woman named Lori Cottle, who's our head of student services. She's been there almost as long as I have. Maybe she's been there only 27 years. And
And Lori sees it as her job to make every student's journey throughout Stanford as easy and satisfying as possible. And she'll tell you who to talk to, who not to talk to. She'll tell you which rules are completely inflexible and which ones you can get around and how to get around them. And to me, somebody like her is an absolutely beautiful part of a system. Maybe she's changed a few rules already.
But mostly she knows how the system works and she sees it as her job to help you have the best journey you can through the system as a Stanford student. She advises undergraduates, masters and PhD students in our department, and they all have a different set of rules. And she all helps them get through a fairly complicated system as easily as possible.
And this must be true not just at universities, but at organizations across the board. As organizations get bigger, they get more complex. There are more ways in which things fit together or don't fit together. There are organizational and institutional histories that people might not
know if they're encountering the organization for the first time. Having someone play this role, and you use the word tour guide, I might use the word translator, because I think that's the other role that this person is playing, to say, here's how this section of the organization talks to this other section of the organization. So invaluable.
Yes, and to me, very often people like that, and I think of organizations with silos and occupations, very often they're people who are generalists in a sea of specialists that they know enough about how each part works to sort of glue the system together and to serve as tour guides for all of us. You talk about a very interesting idea called the rule of halves. What is the rule of halves, Bob?
So the rule of halves, this is an idea that actually Lydie Klotz, he and I came up with the notion that as sort of a thought experiment,
if you went through the number of meetings you have, the length of the emails, the number of emails you sent, what would happen if you cut it by 50%? And then the example we use in the book is it comes to us from a guy named Rob Cross. He was working with an executive, a guy named Scott, who had about 5,000 employees reporting to him. And he also had 16 direct reports. And he also had this philosophy that he should be involved in all decisions, right?
And one of the things that Rob Cross did with him as sort of a consulting job is he said, we're going to cut everything by 50%.
The number of direct reports you have, the number of emails you send, the number of meetings you go to. And it turned out that this guy saved his job and saved his marriage, as Rob tells it, because he actually did apply the rule of halves. So we're not saying to all of your listeners you should cut everything by 50 percent. But it's a good sort of thought experiment to start with. And it was kind of fun because Lydie Klotz and I, I don't know if it's his idea or my idea, but we give each other credit.
But in some ways, I think what you're saying is that if an organization has a set of policies or rules and you cut the policies in half or cut the rules in half, it doesn't mean that that has to be your final answer. You might still decide you actually need to add back many rules that you've cut. But just the thought experiment, the effect of basically saying, let me cut it in half and see what actually is essential, jolts our minds, I think, into awareness of how complex our systems have become.
Yeah, yes. Another also related example, which we talk about in the book and was based on a little piece that I wrote with Rebecca Hines, who was – Rebecca Hines is a wonderful person. She was involved as our research assistant from the very beginning as an undergraduate, and now she runs something called the Asana Work Innovation Lab. She's actually hiring professors instead of working for them.
And so we did this little piece on, we call it a team reset. And it was with 60 Asana employees. And what she did with 30 of those 60s is that she had them remove all standing meetings from their calendars for 48 hours. And then after evaluating, if you will, the amount of effort and the value of each one, add them back in.
That to me, that's a complete cleanse. And that's this idea of once you take something away, it forces you to think about whether you actually want to put it back in. So and by the way, that team reset experience saved the average employee about four hours a week.
You tell a remarkable story about Winston Churchill during the very difficult days of World War II, focused not on the Nazi war machine, but on bureaucrats in Britain. Tell me that story, Bob.
This is August 1940. The Blitzkrieg started a month later. And what he did is he sent out a 234-word memo called the Brevity Memo. And he said, please stop writing such long, convoluted, detailed memos. It's slowing down the whole system. He said it much more elegantly than that. And then he also added this notion that the length and number of memos that are written by an ambassador is not an indication of the quality of your work.
And by the way, and this is consistent with our notion that friction fixing is sort of like mowing the lawn. There is no one and done. When he came back, because, you know, those of us who know the history, he was he was prime minister during World War Two, but then he got voted out and then he came back some years later. When he came back in the 50s, he wrote more brevity memos and said it was even worse than before. So it is one of those things that you've got to have the discipline to keep fighting over and over again. There's no one and done with this sort of stuff.
Because of course things will keep growing back because of the addition sickness that we all suffer from. Yes, yes. We are just humans. A crucial lesson that runs through many of these ideas is the lesson of empathy. Organizations, companies, and governments often run poorly because the people making the decisions are divorced from the experience of the people who work in the organization and the people who need the services of the organization.
One of Bob's superheroes when it comes to fixing problems with friction is an executive at General Motors named Mary Barra.
Every person I've ever worked with just loves her. And the number of different jobs she's had at General Motors are amazing. She ran a large plant. She was head of manufacturing. She was head of supply chain. She was head of HR before they brought her in. So rather than being somebody who just is sort of focused on one element of running this large, complex organization, she understands how it runs. And then the other thing she does, since I've
we interviewed a number of people who worked with her, is she's the classic person who makes very strong decisions, but she always waits to hear everybody's opinion. And then she says, we're going to do this. And I think that's a hallmark of a good leader who glues together different elements of an organization. They hear all the opinions, but then they also make a clear decision about what should and shouldn't be done. Because leaders who have unclear messages talk about creating friction and
You get to spend all sorts of time discerning what the boss actually means. I think partly what we're saying here is over and over, you need people who understand how different parts of an organization fit together. And especially as organizations get big and complex, someone who has worked in HR and has worked in supply chain and has worked in finance and has worked in this, that, and the other knows how these things actually interact with each other and has seen how the problem looks from different points of view.
Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And to me, that's sort of the hallmark of somebody who's a good friction fixer because they're always learning more about how different pieces of the system fit together. So, Bob, you've been married for nearly 40 years. As we're having this conversation, your 40th wedding anniversary is coming up next year. Talk about the idea of friction in relationships and when they're useful, when they're not, how they've played a role in your life.
Well, yeah. Well, you know, I guess the opening line, what's the Supreme song? You can't hurry love. So, so my wife Marina, who is, who is, she's a lawyer. She's a rational person. We do not make decisions quickly in our family if they're important and,
And so we started living together when I was 21 and she was 19. And we lived together seven years before we got married. And the story is that so I'm an academic. And at this point, I was a brand new academic at Stanford. I was just starting to, you know, to be considered for the tenure process.
And my late father-in-law's name was Rod Park. He stood up and gave us a toast. He was at that time, he was provost at UC Berkeley. He understood academics.
And he said, so Bob is used to a seven-year tenure clock. And at seven years, they make a decision up or out. And he said, Marina has made the same decision. She's given him the seven-year test, and it's up. So that was sort of the beginning of that. And you can't hurry love. It takes a long time. And some people do get married after their first dates, but I'm not sure that's a good idea. Yeah.
But can you talk about the idea that in some ways relationships themselves are, you know, they're not like products. They're not things that you can rush to market. They're things that in fact take time and they grow and they ripen and they ripen at their own speed. And sometimes hurrying them along or wishing that they were something that they are not is a fool's errand.
Yes, it is a full zero. And if we're going to do a little bit more empirically, there are a whole set of studies, and sometimes academics call this prior joint experience. But you can look at startups that are founded by people who have worked together. They tend to be more successful at Stanford, way back to Hewlett-Packard. Instagram was founded by people who worked together before into it. You can look at research on surgery, that if you're...
anesthesiologists and surgeons have done more procedures together, especially at the same hospital, your outcomes are likely to be better. There is a point where relationships get stale and you've got to make things fresh. But this idea of when people have worked together before that they tend to be more effective, especially for difficult, complex tasks, is something that's very important. So this notion that working things out takes time is important.
Bob Sutton is a psychologist at the Stanford School of Engineering. With Hagi Rao, he is co-author of The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Bob, thanks so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Shankar, it's just been remarkable. And thank you for reading the book so closely. I felt like I've had a quiz on a book that I spent seven years writing, and I even forgot some parts. So thank you. Well, you get an A-plus, Bob. You get an A-plus. Thank you. Thank you.
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you know someone who would enjoy today's episode or any of the episodes in our Innovation 2.0 series, please share it with them.
Your word-of-mouth recommendations make a huge difference in helping to connect new listeners to the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantham. See you soon.
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