 Hi there, my name is Abhijeet Baduri and I help organizations and individuals upskill themselves to prepare themselves for a fabulous career ride ahead. I'm also the author of the book Career 3.0, which I wrote because we need to really rethink our career strategy in a world which is getting upended with a number of different things. Artificial intelligence is one of them, but there are many more factors such as demographics, you know, such as political challenges, such as climate changes. Yes, all these things also impact careers, but the purpose of this podcast was to actually talk to you about the many, many different ways in which careers can unfold, some of which is planned, but a lot of it is unplanned. This is really why I'm going to ask you a little quiz question, which is that imagine that you are meeting a person who had a low GPA in high school whose GPA is 1.9 out of 4. So that's a really low score and then you kind of think that the person is going to improve and the person that does improve and makes it to a 2.1 in the graduation time. Where do you think this person will end up? And then just to give you a perspective, the person actually delivered pizzas, so that's a hint for you and the person delivered pizzas at Stanford and where do you think the person ended up? Well, the person ended up at Stanford and just before that, you know, he taught organization behavior at University of Michigan to the undergraduate students and then while at Stanford actually was involved in three very interesting projects. One is the Stanford Tech Ventures program, actually was the co-founder of the design school there and center for work, technology, and organizations. And my friends, I am delighted to bring to you the legendary one and only Bob Sutton. I don't think I've ever quite been introduced like that. I mean, Gene, it's great to talk to you and I think I'm excited to talk about careers and I'm a big fan of yours. When I was reading out this kind of, you know, your bio, I was getting a little over when I will confess because, you know, I'm sitting and talking to a person whose book made it to the New York Times bestseller list and of course, you know, all the things that you've done, seven books and an amazing career journey when you were growing up. You know, where were you growing up and what did you want to be when somebody would have asked you that question? I think nobody asked me that question. You know, like when I'd be like a firefighter or something. When I was younger, probably what I really wanted to be that wasn't good enough, frankly, was to race sailboats professionally. You know, I have many excuses and explanations to my low GPA, but one of them was I would just spend so much time racing sort of small sailboats. And some of my friends, one named John Bertrand, went ahead to have careers where they'd win, you know, Olympic medals and world championships and they're supported to race sailboats professionally, mostly by very wealthy people. But I wasn't good enough. I was kind of good enough that they expected to beat me. Maybe they had to work a little bit at it. This is the way I would describe it. But I didn't really have any ambitions. My assumption and my family's assumption was I was going to go into my father's business, which what was that about? He was a defense subcontractor. There used to be a lot of Navy ships in the San Francisco Bay Area. And so I spent them in addition to the pizza job and I'd spend a little time working on U.S. Navy ships and helping my dad. Thank goodness I didn't go to work with my dad and my dad and I did not get along that well. And he wasn't that good of a business person. He kept going out of business, in businesses too. The assumption was I was going to go into the family business in this college was sort of like a silly thing. And in my family there was, until my generation, hardly anybody graduated from high school. We're sort of entrepreneurs, people in restaurants, jewelry stores. My dad's job was driving a coffee truck delivering coffee to restaurants until he became an entrepreneur. So kind of a lot of failed entrepreneurs in my family. I would describe it as in small businesses. When you started teaching, what was your vision of what teaching would be all about and has it changed over time? That's a really good question. So the way I started teaching to be completely direct, I eventually, despite my low grade point average, I went to the junior college system in California, which is wonderful because you can transfer to the UC system. So I transferred to Berkeley. And by the way, I was so terrified of going to my father's business that I knew my only hope was to get good grades. So I got almost straight A's in junior college and in Berkeley just out of sheer terror of going into the family business because I knew that was my main option. But eventually I got interested in psychology and especially the psychology of work. So I started out my view of teaching, which was probably influenced by what I saw at Berkeley and also at Michigan was, well, first of all, teaching was a secondary activity because what you were supposed to do is you're supposed to publish these obscure articles in academic journals, and that's how you got a job. And the way you got tenure was by publishing more obscure jobs in academic journals. So my dissertation was on the process of organizational debt. So it wasn't on what caused it. It was an announcement is made and how you disband the organization. In terms of teaching, teaching was something that I got much more interested in teaching as I got older. Actually, in terms of teaching, it was something you were supposed to do as little preparation as possible and to get sort of minimally good scores. And I'm not joking about this. This was the expectation. And after my third year at Stanford, and I had a very strong research record because I published a lot of my articles and prestigious journals. And my department chair at one point told me he was worried that my teaching evaluations were too high and suggested I slack off a little bit. It's not like this at Harvard Business School, but it's but a real publisher pair of schools like Stanford, you can get this message. It was like, you know, your teaching evaluations are so high, they might think that you can't do research either. And it will be easier for me to present your papers if your teaching evaluations are a little worse. It's different. It really heavy teaching schools like at Harvard Business School. If you can't teach, you don't make it faster third or fourth year. At Stanford, they express a lot of concern. But if your research is really good, you probably get tenure anyways in most departments. I get in trouble for this, but I have academic freedom and allowed to say this stuff. So how my teaching has changed, I don't think it's gotten worse, although maybe some people will tell you it has. The way it has changed is that over the years, I used to just think that my job was to be the smartest person in the room and deliver material. And to tell them about academic studies and deliver material. But the main thing I've learned is that, and this is especially true as we move to remote learning when it's just me teaching. And it's a large classroom. I try never to go more than six or seven minutes without having some serious interaction. That's one thing that I've learned like a little game, a question and answer, having them doing something in duos. The other kind of teaching I do, and it's more in teams is in the Sanford Design School. We'll have the mostly working in projects and consulting while they're actually, you know, for example, one project is to throw it out. So our students did some years ago was to try to make the San Francisco Opera more attractive to younger people. But that would be like a duo working together. And we would sort of stop by and ask them how we can help. And then we'd have the teams report out what they're doing and try to help one another. But the way that I would describe my philosophy of teaching, and this includes worth executives too, is to try to talk less and pull them in more. In the professors, it's even in the word, we profess. You know, I'm supposed to be telling you the truth and you're smiling and listening. And I should probably shut up now and let you ask a question because I've been going too long already. You know, this is just fascinating. When you think about the value that your education had at one point of time, if you think about it today, a lot of employers actually say that a graduation degree is not necessary. You can get a couple of credits and do you think that's a temporary phase? Do you think it's going to be here to stay? You know, a couple of comments about that. First of all, yeah, I think that you can be enormously successful without getting a graduate degree. And I've had so many students over the years who are known of them who are great dropouts of Stanford. You know, Elizabeth Holmes tends to get all the credit. There's even this show of the dropout about her. But if you go down the list of people who dropped out of Stanford, it's pretty impressive. And I'll start with one guy and I won't use his name. So he was my advisee two years ago for one session. Undergraduate advisee, he had a 4.0 grade point average, hard classes, and his goal was not to graduate. That was his goal. I've never had a student with a 4.0 whose goal was to get graduated by the National Football League in the first round. And he did and he's a starter in a football team. So he's reached his goal and maybe he'll come back and get his degree. And then he dropped out of Berkeley's computer science department and he went back. You probably know this story under the pseudonym Rocky Raccoon and he finished his degree mostly because his mother was upset. He never graduated even though he was became a millionaire. Our dropouts include Reese Witherspoon, the actress, John McEnroe, John Steinbeck, Larry and Sergey did not finish their PhDs. So I don't think people, Mark Zuckerberg and so forth, I don't think that people necessarily have to finish. And this is the old Eulett Packard thing. I don't even know this, but David Packard used to say the primary function that Stanford University serves for Silicon Valley before is called Silicon Valley, was if we just attract smart people from all over the world and we kind of screen them, you know, somebody with a GPA like me is not going to get in, we screen them and then they come here and they want to stay in California because the weather is so good. His argument is that that alone was a valuable function that the School of Engineering at Sanford provided to Eulett Packard, even if we taught them nothing, you know, because they create the networks and they get in the right place. So I do think that we actually teach them useful stuff. I'm not going to say we don't teach them useful stuff. Just right now, for example, and this is not my area, all people do is talk about algorithms like this is a new topic. Stanford Computer Science Department, they've been doing algorithms as long, pretty much as long as I've been there 40 years. And then the way that the algorithms are going to change the nature of work. I've got a colleague, Melissa Valentine, she's been studying that for eight or nine years. Another one she's now a PhD student who is who's now at Harvard Business School, Sadal Neely. She's been studying that various as that for 15 or 20 years. I think that they can actually teach us stuff because they're doing fundamental research. And also they both all of them happen to be good teachers too in the classroom. So I think there's some hope. I don't know whether everybody has to take every class and get the actual degree and everything. That said, let's take people like Mark Zuckerberg and folks like that. For their children, they want their children to go to the most prestigious universities and to finish. I've never met any of these dropout people who don't want their children to finish. So I always think that's a good test. You've seen a lot of entrepreneurs, you've been teaching a bunch of them, and you've seen this whole world open up and become far more mainstream than what it was a couple of years ago, certainly. When you think about this, what has been the most spectacular factor that people don't think about when they're making choices about their career? Boy, you know, that's interesting because for entrepreneurs, in some ways they're kind of like a different animal. There's the ones who, let's just say they want to work for McKinsey or Bain or Google or Microsoft. You know, Microsoft, you were there for long. I can't believe it. Microsoft is now the employer of choice among large employers. Employers, how did this happen? It used to be the last choice. No, it's the first choice. So the people who want to go work for Microsoft, I mean, there are students like that, and God bless them that they want to go work for a big company. There's a different sort of focus. The ones of the focus are the ones who get so enamored with an idea that they just can't stop themselves. So two of our students, and I always forgetting last name, I'll give you an example. Their names are Amanda and Greta. And look them up. They're co-founders, a company called Sequel. And they got obsessed when they were undergraduates with, they're both female athletes, that tampons they use leaked like crazy and they suck, which that's a big market, right? They got obsessed with that problem and they took every entrepreneurship class they could take. They took them together and they almost didn't make it. It's like a married couple that work on the relationship. They almost didn't make it after years of them and focused on this problem. And I said, because one of the classes we teach the design school, which I taught a little bit is called Launchpad and Launchpad, it's hardcore. You have to have a rough prototype of a product in six weeks. This is like a tough class and a lot of students failed. A lot of companies have come out of it. So they were veterans of that. And so now what is it? They've only been out of Stanford three or four years. They got $5 million in venture capital. They just got FDA approval for their product. But they've got this focus on doing this thing. And sometimes it fails and they go to work for a big company. But to me, and they also don't quite like being told what to do by authority figures too. Kind of look for that a little bit. They kind of want to be the authority figure. And you've had a lot of experience with this too, but it's just, it's the sense of inner drive and sort of focus. And it's not so different than that football player that I was talking about. He knew what he wanted. So those are some of the things I think of. And then there's also a secondary part. When you get somebody in Zuckerberg would have been an example, actually, and the founders of Instagram too. What happened is they leave and then they take the early followers with them. And in terms of career choice, that's a different sort of thing. Isn't it? It's like the person who starts the company and then they hire their initial group of friends. That's how IDEO has started, for example, by David Kelly. He laughed and then he hired sort of just three or four favorite friends from Stanford. And that's how they started too. So that's another career strategy that you kind of follow in your friends who is a founder. When it comes to your own career, you kind of said that you could either be an individual contributor and have the autonomy, you know, as a professor does, or you could actually be somebody with influence like an executive does. It comes with a lot of responsibility and a fair bit of guilt. Talk a little about that. Oh boy, there's a lot in that question. Let's separate two things. Okay. When I was a second or third year academic, a very famous now dead organizational theorist James March told me you can have freedom or you can have influence, but you don't have both. So he'd been a dean before and he'd been Jim March and he was much happier not having it. And even worse than that, academia, again, this way you get tenure as a tenure track professor. So this is a career strategy. I'm not sure you've heard before. I had just gotten my job from Stanford and I'm in line at this research institute called the Institute for Social Research and behind me is a quite famous psychologist. His name is Robert Zients. He was actually head of the Institute at that point. He was in the 60s. He said, so Bob, I hear you got a job at Stanford. He said, yeah, I said, let me give you some career advice. He said, what you do is your second year, not your first, your second year, you take a really visible administrative job and then you screw it up as much as you possibly can. So what are you talking about? And he said, well, because nobody has ever denied tenure for being a bad administrator. And if they figure out you're a good administrator, what they do is they give you even more administrative work and it reduces your chances of getting tenure. So that's my advice to you is to get a visible administrative job and screw it up. Now, one thing I would say is I was lucky. And this is not true of many academics. I was lucky to have an apartment chairs who thought that they shouldn't give me any administrator jobs till I got tenure. So I was actually protected from that. So that's sort of an interesting strategy. But I think the way that this, if I would, you know, sort of replay in my own mind, my strategy is I have rarely been in charge of things. Well, I've been called co-director of this and that over the years. I've never been department chair. But my strategy and we were talking this, it comes from this book, orbiting the giant hairball, which I recommend to your viewers and listeners. There's a spy guy named Gordon McKenzie. He was the creative paradox and hallmark cards. That was his job. His theory was the way you want to do with bureaucracy is if you're completely out of touch with it, you can't learn anything. You can't contribute anything and you have no influence at all. But if you're in the absolute middle of the hairball and if your office is next to the CEO, you go to the big meetings and everything, you're so focused that it's really hard to see out of the natural group sink and inner focus that comes from all organizations. So his perspective is what you should do is you should be away from the hairball most of the time. And then you should drop in intermittently both to get new ideas and to deposit your ideas. And then you should go back into orbit around the hairball. And the orbiting is the analogy is sort of interesting because it's not like you're completely detached and it's not like you're wrapped in the hairball. And for other people, this is not the right strategy. But for me in the organizations you describe groups that you describe founding. So there was a point that I'll focus on the Stanford D school or design school. There's multiple co-founders. I would be listed as a co-founder, but it's really David Kelly. It's Snow White in the Seven Dwarves and I'm one of the Dwarves. And there was a point where David, he was then CEO of IDO too, he kind of bring a group of us to IDO and he kind of give us wine and food about once every two weeks. And he had this crazy idea. I even have it in my artist, David Kelly's dream. And he kept talking about that we were going to have this school where it was creativity thinking and all the sort of stuff and thread design thinking. And you know, it's because David's so much fun and he's so charismatic. And he'd go to the dean and he'd make these really vague, terrible pitches. But then one day he came back with $35 million from this guy named Hasso Platner. And we was like, you know, like the dog that catches the car, that chases the car. We actually had to do something in the D school. Turns out to be a very important part of Stanford has taught thousands of students and now actually is overseeing our design majors officially and everything. Probably the total fundraising is up to $100 million or so. He's raised more money. But that's a case where I helped in the beginning and kind of by year three or four, it started, God love them. I love those people. It started turning into more of a bureaucracy. It started turning into an airball and the airball starts growing around you. And then I started getting involved in other hairball. So it's not like I was, I was still, I still teach in the Stanford D school a little bit. But the idea of going in every day now, it's just another bureaucratic unit at Stanford that is doing great work, but it's too predictable. So that's, so it's a career strategy. I think I'm more of a hairball sort. I'm better as an outsider than an insider. You have just recently written a book. I'm a big fan of which is called the fiction project. Yeah. My God, it is such a fabulous book. You know, I can't raise it enough. I completely recommend this book to all five viewers. How do you make writing easier and the wrong things harder when it comes to career? Give me one or two ideas. You know, like you've talked about subtraction being one of them. You said that take like a fiction fixer. And I just, some of so many ideas, which I really loved, but talk to me a little bit about how can we use some of these ideas to be more successful in one's career. If the definition of more successful one career is, and it's too positive, one is designing your career so that you avoid the things that slow you down, that distract you. And this is very important that drive you crazy, that might not drive other people crazy. So in some ways, yes, all of us have job descriptions. Even I think I have a job description somewhere. I don't know where it is. But the fact is we all can make decisions about what meetings we go to. Another one, which is, I'm a big believer in, and I've gotten in trouble for saying this, but I'm going to keep saying it. If you are in a psychologically safe organization, this is not true of all 13, learning the skill of walking out of the room when you're not creating any value is something I think is really important because you're actually, you're removing yourself from the situation where you came up rather than just sitting at the table and waiting for the 90 minute meeting to end. If after 45 minutes you're not useful, like even being in an organization where there's norms, that would even be better, but at least if it's safe. And you're also doing greater good for your clients, for your colleagues by going to something where you're actually creating value. And I've gotten in trouble for this because people say, oh, you can do it because you're a powerful professional. I noticed that some of our most productive assistant professors at Stanford are very good at this. They arrive late, they leave early, and they're for the part of the meeting that they can be valuable. But to me, this idea of sort of choosing the paths, and this is, of course, you must write about mentoring a lot. What a great mentor does, and maybe you should talk about this, to me what a great mentor does, and I think of my early department chairs at Stanford, what they would do is that they would essentially give me advice not to go to meetings, not to talk to certain people who will waste your time. Oh, talk to that guy. You know, he's really fun. He's really entertaining, but he's just going to waste your time. Where to get resources? Who can help you? So to me, I guess this is mentoring, but you're designing your own life and having a trail guide who can help you through the system. Sometimes those are formal and informal mentors, but I do think that's why I was lucky early in my career, was I had mentors who would guide me to the path, if you will, the path of least resistance. The other side, and I'll do this just briefly, is one of the things, and this is empirical, there are certain things in life that should be hard and slow, and if you're going to be successful, the reason you want to get rid of all that bad friction is so you have the time required to do excellent work and not doing sloppy work. Probably my favorite story in the book, which is believe it or not from the Harvard Business Review, was when the Harvard Business Review interviewed the comedian and, you know, star of Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld. They asked him if McKinsey could have helped him make his process, create a process more efficient, and he said, no, the right way is the hard way. Good, hard creativity is fundamentally inefficient, and if you look at the evidence about what it takes to be creative, you fail more, you end up arguing with people, things are constantly going wrong, and that's when you're doing it right, and that's what you should save your frustration for, and I'll end with just one study, and this came out since our book was published, so the interesting study did, you know these fMRI, where they do the brain scan type things, and they gave people different difficulties of problems, and they also measured their IQs, and what they found out was people who had the highest IQs solved simple problems faster, that's not a surprise, but people who had higher IQs solved complex problems slower, but they solved them better, and, you know, these fMRI things are just kind of the different parts of our brains, they would wait for the different parts of the brain to connect, so they'd sort of understand the whole problem. I mean, we can get into sort of the organizational context, but my argument, and Huggy's argument about friction, is the reason that it's so important to remove the stuff that should be in the way and waste your time and distracts you, the meetings, the emails, the endless stupid projects that you never should have gotten on in the first place. The CO's pet project is my favorite thing, design thinking, which I'm part of, sometimes it's really stupid to get involved in design thinking projects, so you can have the time to do the stuff that's really hard, and one other thing that I would say is time consuming, and I'm curious what you think about, is that when I, and there's empirical support for this too, when I think of the most satisfying and most impactful relationships I've had, and then when I look at the empirical literature, it's not the quick easy flash teams where you get together once with strangers you've never met before, it's long term relationships you have with people where you slowly develop your work style, figure out who's good at what, who's bad at what, and develop that mutual trust, that is not an efficient process, and that's the kind of thing that you, instead of wasting time on the irrelevant meetings and the CO's pet project, that's where you might want to focus your energy. The reason you get rid of bad friction is so you can focus on what should be hard in life. And do you think it becomes easier to do this online? Is it better done in post? Well, you know, the online thing, so I am, there's good Microsoft data about this, that what happened when the pandemic hit and people focused online, what they tended to do, so when they put it, their weak ties tended to fall away. So people had strong ties, they tended to interact even more, but the people that you just run into occasionally, there'd be less interaction with them. So at least based on those studies, which is quite large scale studies, hundreds of thousands of people they studied, that the risk there for online is you're going to just spend your time hanging out with people you already know and perhaps making those relationships even stronger. But in terms of online, I just think everything with online is both more efficient and it takes kind of more discipline, because you have to schedule everything. Things don't happen accidentally. In some ways, that's the serendipity is really what triggers creativity in my view. So I'm also a big fan of those serendipitous meetings and I think I get more out of it personally. But then, potentially, that's not how a lot of people take, so we come to that. So I have a question for you. Since we both have struggled with online, it's always I like the online work, because it's efficient. It's efficient and then I'm kind of an introvert and it's really easy to leave, press the button to walk out of the room and boom, it's I gotta go. So one of the things that I've tried to do and I'd say with mixed success, probably influenced by the weak ties literature, is a lot of us get invited to meetings where there's strangers, online meetings and I try to go to a few of them a week where I don't know anybody or there are people I don't know very well. In some ways, that should be a counter force to the online problems, but so that's one solution. And the other thing I would say, you may have this as well, I have quite a few people, I would say even my travel agent and the person who's actually helping me promote this book, Nina Nicolino is her name, probably had a thousand interactions with her in the last four months. I know her much better than people I've had many in-person meetings for. So it is possible, but boy, I wonder what the evidence is about this, the cat is out of the bag, it's not going to end, this is my colleague remote, it's in business school, says if you look at the evidence, you may not like the remote work revolution, but it has happened. Yes, absolutely, I think so too. I'm going to sort of switch to another book of yours, which really caught the imagination of the people it went into the New York Times bestseller list and you have lots of fans, which one am I talking about? For better and worse, I got a friend, Lenny Mendenza, who he was a senior director at McKinsey Freers, and I did all the presentations for Lenny, and Lenny always introduced me the same. He said, no matter what Bob does, and he describes all the other stuff I've done, no matter how hard he tries, he's always going to be known as the asshole guy, and that's just my fate in life. And yes, this book has sold more than all my other books combined, and it's just a way that it's going to be. So I accept it as my fate. I did it myself. And it's such a brilliant book, so simple. The idea is so instinctively appealing, and it's about the no asshole rule. I would seek advice from you because one of us have, and I have had my share to in abundance of leading the A guys at work. How do you deal with your manager, who is really that proverbial asshole? Oh gosh, I mean I got asked this question so much. So I thought when I wrote this book, I thought it was about building organizational culture. There's only one chapter about how to deal with assholes, and it's mostly about leadership and culture, but after getting 8,000 emails, it's basically the same question that you just asked. I've got an asshole boss, what do I do? I wrote the asshole survival guide, which didn't sell particularly well, but I tried to think about it. And to me, in some ways, it's the old distinction between exit voice and loyalty, and you've kind of got to do a human calculation, which is that we all get in situations we can't escape from, which are temporary or permanent. And if you're just sort of stuck there, you've got to develop the mindset. I hate to say this to toughen yourself up. In exhibit one would be one of the heroes of the asshole survival guide and a friend of mine, Becky Margiata. She went to West Point, was a relatively early woman at West Point. She's about 4 foot 11 and she said that probably about three times a week, she would have an upperclassman with their nose at the inch from her face, like nose to nose, screaming at her for things like she would be asked to memorize all the headlines in the New York Times that day and she'd get one wrong, and she gets, and this is just the hazing, right? That's the hazing for West Point cadets plebes. And she said her coping technique was to view them as comedians. The nastier they were, the funnier they seemed to her. And she said she would mostly get in trouble for giggling accidentally while she was being screamed at instead of falling apart. She said that's why I tend to get in trouble for it. And she made it through, she became captain of this head of successful career. So the classic way to do it is they call this temporal distancing. When you're going through something difficult imagine that you're in the future and you're looking back at it, it won't seem so bad. But it's kind of like doing self-cognitive behavioral therapy and we all have to, you know, sort of like when you're in a bad airplane flight and you're in the middle seat and it's just horrible. You kind of say it'll be over, I look back and it won't seem so bad. The next thing is just to leave. And I'm a big believer in quitting, by the way. This is something like people talk about quiet quitting and everything. I don't care what you call it. If you're like in a situation where they're treating you like shit and quiet quitting, I'm kind of confused why this is supposed to be a new concept because as long as I've known about the workplace is when there's a toxic person, we've all been incredibly skilled at avoiding that person. Like you don't invite them to meetings. You don't go to the meetings that they're at. This is just the way life has been. If it's your boss, well you put in less effort. The evidence that boss doesn't treat their employees like dirt, get less out of them. This has been known for 60 years by Gallup. I don't know, 50 years. So there's quitting. And then the last way is to fight back. And I've got very clear guidelines about when you should fight back which is that if you're going to fight back and you don't have any power in the situation you're going to probably get squished like a bug and you're probably going to lose. You're probably better off leaving your hiding from your boss or something but if you're going to fight back, first thing you got to do is to document. The second thing you need to do is have allies. And the third thing you need to do is to have somebody who has enough power that you can go to them that they'll actually help you with it. And if you don't have all three, you are in trouble and although there's another strategy I'll talk about in a minute. The example I have is that right after the no asshole rule came a woman who was an animal control officer saw a dog catcher. She wrote me about how they got rid of a nasty fellow dog catcher and it was they complained to their boss about a really abusive and actually racist co-worker and he said I can't do anything about it. And so they put together what they called the asshole diaries that she and all of her co-workers just recorded everything that this woman said for three weeks. They brought the asshole diary altogether as a posse to the boss and then even with civil servants the boss got all of a sudden the person disappeared. If you can do that it's great or she actually is now somebody I know a little bit Gretchen Carlson the way that she got rid of Roger Ailes who was her boss at Fox News. Roger Ailes said her directly if you have sex with me I will give you a better hour on TV but she had a tape recorded. And it's in the state of New York it's actually it's against the law in California to record your boss without their permission but in New York which is one party consent she got that. So there are ways to fight back so those are the three main ways you know get out of there suck it up and deal with it somehow or put together a posse and fight back. There is a fourth way which works with some bosses there's a bunch of evidence that people who leave others feeling terrible they lack awareness we as human beings are not very aware of other see us there are some situations where if you gently go to your boss and give them the feedback there are some situations where it actually works especially and this is a distinction I had made we're mostly talking about certified assholes that's what we call in the book there's a people are time again assholes all of us under the wrong conditions can be nasty unpleasant people and psychologists are very good at creating situations that turn us into jerks when we're in a hurry when we're tired when we're around a bunch of nasty people most of us humans become nasty so there's also the temporary type assholes and that might be the best way to give the feedback to your certified asshole boss is to say I know you're not usually like this but we've been seeing these behaviors lately I do have a number of examples of people who have written me over the years about how they made the journey from they describe themselves as recovering assholes sometimes and one of the key things they do is they have people in their lives who will tell them give them negative feedback and they try to get better and somebody who does not get credit for this is Steve Jobs there is an argument in this this is in the book it's from Ed Katmell Ed Katmell who was president of Pixar he met with Steve Jobs once a week for 26 years and he said when he first met Steve it's pretty clear Steve was an asshole and this was like around the time he'd been thrown out of Apple next wasn't going very well and when he was young he was really a jerk and the sign was and this is Ed's report that as Steve got older and he went through sort of like the dark years and then he came back to Apple and he still could be tough but he became a better person and also that was one of the key things that Steve's board did to help him he was a trillion dollar coach how can I forget his name Campbell that's it so Campbell who was on his board that was one of the things that Steve would go for a walk with Campbell every Sunday and they'd talk about things and that was one of the people who made Steve a nicer person Bill Campbell how can I forget his name Bill Campbell I met him a couple of times talk about mentoring your audience says no Bill was mentored to jobs he was mentored to the Google people in Silicon Valley known as a trillion dollar coach Bill Campbell was one of the key people who helped jobs become a better person and less of a jerk and that's one thing that really did not like the Walter Isaacson biography this is Catmills point is that he saw this change and Steve over the years and he said you know the last couple of years of Steve's life he would spend 20 minutes talking to my assistant into the Pixar security guard about their families and how everything was going so it's not like he was a complete sort of selfish jerk he became better with age and it was parked because he basically got fired from Apple because he was a jerk I mean that was the best reason so anyway so there is hope for us for us jerks does a setback does that really change personality what happened with Steve I think it may depend on the person and this is the career thing is that if you have a setback and you only blame other people and you don't change the people you're hanging out with if you look at your friends and the people you spend time with and probably what your values are if you have a setback in life to me those are the two things that I think of which is am I learning from it and am I taking responsibility and the other part about it is that some people get depressed it's okay to get depressed temporarily we're all just human but I do say this to my friends and mental health is a big issue these days finally is that if you're going through one of those periods it's great to have an executive coach but sometimes a therapist is even better with the pandemic a lot of my friends are in human resources and boy being a CHRO of a big company is really hard you think about what happened with the pandemic first you had to shift everybody to remote work almost in minutes it seemed like then all these companies hired like crazy then they did a bunch of layoffs and this is like successful companies this is almost everybody but Apple if you're ahead of HR first you're going to shift everybody to remote work then you're hiring like crazy and then you realize you've hired too many people and then you're doing the layoffs so whether or not these were smart things or not HR is at the tip of the spear of doing it all and now having all of the issue with Palestine's versus Israel that's a whole nother regardless of where one is on that politically if you're in HR that's a really difficult perspective from a policy standpoint not to mention the social justice movement I mean it's really difficult being in HR so my friends who are in HR are largely burned out and depressed and in a couple cases they've said it's like don't you have a better list of executive coaches than I do and I start talking to them about therapists and a lot of them have never been to a therapist and I think the mental health thing is real and the amount of pressure that people feel in business is something that it's very important to have a good therapist You had a chance to read the early stages of my book Career 3.0 What skill do you think really appealed to you in that learning what you've not been taught before was the one that you commented about last time I was just wondering what is your strategy to learn how do you learn stuff that you Oh, so an AI is a great example so the way that I learn stuff that I don't know anything about is that I try to make friends with people who are smarter than I am that's one way so I said for six months I did this AI stuff I'm not going to write anything I'm not going to name it well there's a woman named Rebecca Hines she's head of the work innovation lab at Asana I've known her since she was undergrad and we may actually write something on AI because she's teaching me stuff so that's one way is to find smarter people than you and have them teach you the other way which is the old trick that they say in academia which I'm not sure this is a good idea for brain surgery but it might not be so bad for something like leadership which is that the best way to learn about something is to teach it I think it's how I learn design thinking and I think I did both with people like David Kelly or much better design thinkers than I am and then when you try to teach it that's a good way to sort of learn stuff statistics would be an example I think that's how I learned statistics because I was a statistics course assistant for one term and boy I got a lot better at statistics by trying to have to answer the questions and then the other one is just of course you know to fail a lot that's growth mindset stuff one of my favorite PhD students ever Liz Gerber she's now a full professor at Northwestern she had a philosophy that every quarter she would take a class in something she was completely incompetent at so one term it was windsurfing another term it was improv another term it was singing and this is when she was a PhD student and she continued doing it after she had a kid too she said for mental health essentially she always had to be a beginner or a rookie at something because that's how she developed as a person and I think that takes a I mean she's a quite courageous person kind of like that strategy too is to always be doing something that you're incompetent at that's kind of cool that's growth mindset in your own career what are some of the choices you made which you turned out to be great and stuff that didn't turn out to be so great I made so many mistakes it's ridiculous but if I would pick the most instructive mistake that I made even though I talked about my biography that I was delivering pizzas at Sanford and now a professor at Sanford in between I went to Berkeley I was a Berkeley undergraduate and I loved Berkeley I'm very loyal to Berkeley still and I was only there about three years but Berkeley is a tough place but I got a lot of great mentoring there I really had a wonderful time at UC Berkeley and it's what directed me to get to my PhD at Michigan and so I really wanted to be a Berkeley professor and I made great friends with the faculty at the Haas Business School and I actually got hired after when I was a full professor to reach my dream and to go to the Haas Business School and to leave Stanford and by the way even though Stanford probably has higher salary scales than Berkeley does because it's a public school Berkeley pays pretty well and business schools pay more than engineering schools I went to Berkeley for about a 35% raise too so I went there I was all excited well I got there and I was not having any fun it was culturally I don't want to be too nasty but culturally it was a much colder less supportive place and the people in my field were great and by the way I should have known that the Berkeley is a very competitive place where not to bring up the old Microsoft with the guns pointing at each other but Berkeley was like that at the school I mean it was it was like everybody would treat everybody as sort of like their enemy and they were out to get them in my late father-in-law who had been provost there for eight years before I accepted the job said remember when it's like at Berkeley and he said and remember people especially hate the business school because he said the way he pointed out was that there are a whole bunch of people who are opposed to capitalism and it represents capitalism and even worse than that is that people in the sciences the Nobel Prize winners did not like the fact that the Berkeley business school professors are getting paid more than the Nobel Prize winners and I was even asked that why is your salary more than some of the Nobel Prize winners and my answer was those market conditions oh this is the other thing only in academia I actually didn't have to quit Stanford for a year it's a tenured faculty member both Berkeley and Stanford for a year so it would be like you could be an executive at Microsoft and Google and actually there was a quarter I got paid by both too just because of the way that the things work my Provost at the time was one Condi Rice who eventually became the Secretary of State who was just as tough as a Provost and I said Condi do I get a year to decide she said no you get six months by January 1st you have to decide it was actually about five months I knew it wasn't the right place for me and I and I went back and so as John Hennessey who eventually became our university president said to me you're the only faculty member I ever know came back to Stanford for a 30% $30,000 pay cut which I did and so I learned all these things one of the things that I learned is since then is I mean I do this for consulting gigs but to pay no attention to my salary and to just focus on what makes me happy and whatever my salary is my salary is I'm fortunate to have enough money to live as well as I need to live that's not true of everybody in America but for me I actually make enough money and so two things I did there was not was to focus on the intrinsics of the job and then the other thing and I'm not sure this is a career advice you give I've learned that my worst self is when I engage in social comparison that that person has more than me and I feel jealous and my best self is when I just think that I have enough and I'm happy for people who have as much or more than me even when I don't like them I try to be happy for them I've managed to feel happy for people you don't like I wouldn't exactly say that I'm always successful at this but I do try to remind myself that there are other people in life who love them and appreciate them and that's just sort of my problem with them and I mentioned my late father-in-law who was quite a character one of his retirement parties I think I went to two or three that we kept retiring from things this was the Cal one he gave this great speech to us that he said I have a long list of friends in a short list of enemies and I'm equally proud of both lists which is kind of what I tried to think of at Stanford at least I hope my list of enemies is short but one thing that I've sort of learned is that almost everybody in my life who I've disliked has many people who love them and do things in a way that they are loved and that's one of the problems with the term assholes is that there are people who in my mind are certified assholes but there's other people in their life who don't necessarily agree with that either so I try to think about how subjective things are and I fail at that sometimes sometimes I just pissed off and I say those assholes are terrible but I really don't want anything bad to happen to people because I know that they're loved and there's people who care about them at least that's what my best self says to myself my worst self can go to the dark place Bob thank you so very much I mean I just want to once again talk about what a fabulous book you've written then I know that this is something that you totally enjoy doing you know you describe yourself as a writer first and that you really enjoy the act of writing rewriting just refining your thoughts and ideas and more power to you I hope that we will get a chance to read much much more and see a lot of your spectacular welcome tonight thank you very much for I believe I've done lots of interviews about my work I believe this is the first interview I've ever done like this in my life I've been asked so many career and personal questions so I both thank you and I'm not sure I want to thank you completely because it feels a little uncomfortable but I think at this point I don't there's no risk for me revealing things about myself so I appreciate you bringing out a little different self than I usually do in these sort of interviews so thank you thank you so very much and I so appreciate you doing this