 Welcome to the show, Bob. Great to have you. That's great to see you, AJ. We would love to hear what inspired the Friction Project. Well, a lot of frustration inspired the Friction Project. Just going nuts. So, my co-conspirator, Huggy Rao and I, we published a book in 2014 called Scaling of Excellence, and there are all these companies. Well, Salesforce, Facebook, Google, they wanted to scale, baby, scale. They scaled and it was like, look what I've done to myself. There's all these people. There's all these procedures. There's all this complexity. I feel like I'm walking in muck. It's really hard to get things done. And there was this one woman who said to, to Huggy, when we teach executives, and she said, they keep saying, they want me to show initiative and will and creativity. And every day I just feel like, how am I supposed to do that? That was the kind of thing that got us going. Also in our own university, our own employer, since I've been here, I've been here 40 years. I'm an old fart. It's gotten harder and harder to get things done. It actually turns out that at Stanford, we seem to have about the same number of administrators as we do students, more or less. It's within a couple hundred. And I love every administrator I've ever met individually. But collectively, they unwittingly just had more and more stuff for us to do, and they keep each other busy. The old joke, if a town's got one lawyer, they're broke. If a town has two lawyer, they're rich because they just spend all time suing each other. And so that was the, that was, and I can get to the good news, but it started out of friction and frustration. But there's actually a lot of good news in the book. And I became more optimistic as this adventure unfolded. That was the good news. So this book brings up a lot of great points for entrepreneurs and people who are in business. But there's another aspect to this book that is unique to this podcast, which is that those same frictions, if they enter into personal relationships, make them daunting and complex and makes people want to quit. And then when it becomes difficult to hang out with somebody, we opt out of spending time with them. When it's easy to hang out with people, then we're going to opt to hang out with those people more. And if we are looking around and we're asking ourselves, you know, I asked people to hang out, I asked people to do stuff, no one returns my texts. I don't know what's going on. Well, I think the first thing that you should be asking yourself was, are you putting in friction for people to hang out with you? Are you making it hard for them to say yes? Yes. Well, I think, you know, I don't think that bosses and personal relationships are, or work colleagues are all exactly the same. But I think you are getting on some interesting parallels. And I think this is perilous error for me. Like, I'm an organizational psychologist. Like, you should never go to me for dating advice, ask my adult children. But in my personal relationships that yes, to me, there's at least three kinds of people that I tend to avoid, to be honest. Like people, that's a certain sort of friction because they leave you feeling bad. And the people who you just can't get out of your head, those are the people I don't want to hang out with. Then there's the people who mean really well, but they make everything so complicated, they give you a list of 47 things to do. And then they also micromanage you and criticize you because you're not doing as well in the process. This could be anything from getting organized to having sex. I mean, it's like, you know, there's some people that are kind of, you know, a different kind of friction. And then there's people who are just boring. So that's my sort of quick theory. And I think it's important that we look at ourselves. And part of this book for me was raising self-awareness because I think we've all experienced friction on the other end. And we hate it, we avoid it, we talk bad about that person. We try not to get involved in projects with them. But we often don't look at ourselves and potentially the friction that we're causing others, whether it's personal or professional. So what can we do to raise our own self-awareness around friction that we're bringing? So that's a beautiful statement. And the way that we described in the book is that all of us have sort of a cone of friction, that we have the opportunity to make life better or worse for everybody who we touch and in the workplace. I mean, we talk about everybody from Satya Nadella, who is the CEO of Microsoft, who really did a whole bunch of things to get rid of really destructive relationships because they had they had a reward system and in a culture where you got ahead by treating other people like dirt and not cooperating with them. You change the whole reward system. So that's at the very top. And then my favorite example is, so what state are you guys in right now, the United States? I'm in Columbia. California. Yeah. Oh, good. Me too. Okay. So one of my favorite experiences in doing the book is I went to the California DMV to re-register my mother. And I thought it was going to be hell. So I get there at six in the morning, the 7th or the morning, and there's 60 people online. And it's like, okay, if I'm out here by 11, I just like I'm at peace. It's going to suck. And then at 740, this guy, this really nice guy, nice DMV, nice walks down the line, asks each of us what we're doing there. Some people, he says, no, you can't get a passport here. You're wasting your time. Other people, here's a form. You don't have to wait in line. Just fill it out right now and give it to me. He gave me my form. I filled it out. He told me what window to go to. Everybody was nice. And I was done by 815. I was so confused. And then so now, Huggy and I are doing a case study with the people who run the California DMV, and they're dedicated to making our experiences better as citizens. Just for example, there's something called a real ID that everybody in California is going to have to get eventually. And they're doing time in motion studies. They have it down from the time you get to the office till you leave because you have to have a wet signature down from 28 to 8 minutes. So I'm talking to a Google executive last week. Google has really serious problems because they've gotten so big. They have so many processes. They have so many fiefdoms. They actually have a lot of friction problems. So I said to her, if the DMV can fix themselves, you can fix yourself. So everybody's always saying Silicon Valley, it's a solution to everything. Now my motto is, if only these big bureaucracies in the Silicon Valley that, this is like the scaled baby scale, they need to learn from the DMV. So that's my motto. And the DMV, I was really impressed with them. Yeah, I'm shocked. It's shocking to hear, to be honest. I'm still shocked. I try to avoid it as much as possible. Oh, yeah. But actually, that's one of the things that helps is I think that we all try to avoid it. It actually reduces the load on them in some ways too. But they really are making progress, and they really are citizen-centric, and they're using technology, and they're working in their culture to have the people be a little bit more civilized or less uncivilized. They're working on all that sort of stuff. Obviously, the DMV was friction-full, looked at themselves, made some improvements. So if we look at ourselves, how do we recognize that we're causing friction on others, and what can we do to remove the friction that we may be causing on others? I like that. So this is this notion, and this is true for all other kinds of organizational change too, is that if you just point fingers at other people and say, I'm not the problem, you are, it doesn't work. Because what happens is it becomes an orphan problem, and it's all about blame. And yes, I'm as happy to do recreational bitching as much as the next person. But when this stuff actually gets fixed, it's when everybody takes it upon themselves to fix it. So one of the examples that we have in the book, and we've been in touch with this doctor, there's a doctor named Melinda Ashton. She's at Hawaii Pacific. It's the largest healthcare system in Hawaii. And we all know, I don't know about in Colombia, but in much of the rest of the world, when you go to the doctor, instead of looking you in the eye, they just look at the screen of the electronic health records. We probably all have this experience. And so that's the electronic health records had a lot of friction to the healthcare experience. But rather than saying, oh, we have to throw the whole things out, what she did was she ran a sort of a change effort called Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff. And she had everybody go through who was part of the system and make suggestions about ways they could subtract sources of unneeded friction. And usually that was steps. So just for example, they got rid of one of the steps that every nurse and nurse assistant was required to make when they did rounds. And that got rid of 24 seconds for each visit. And this ended up being like something like a thousand hours a month in the whole system. And to me, that's a pretty good model of rather than just complaining about it and pointing fingers, we all worked together to find the problems. And then there was a group who had the power to implement the solutions. And that's the opposite of, it's a simple example, but that's the opposite of teaching it, of treating it as an orphan problem. And it's also a sign that, gee, I have some stories about things that get fixed suddenly and all at once. But in real life, this is, it's like a discipline. It's like, no, like exercising once doesn't seem to work. If you do it once a year, it doesn't seem to work. You got to do it as part of a discipline. Well, that brings up an interesting concept that you have in the book, which is chicken ephers and hollow Easter bunnies. Can I use the word fuckers in this? Am I allowed? Absolutely, you're allowed. So this comes from my friend Becky Margiadin. Becky, she went to West Point, who went to West Point a long time ago, and she was one of the only women there. She was, she's like five one. And, you know, and I love when I talk to Becky, is it talk about friction, the way she said she got through the hazing at West Point when she was a first year? She said, my view was that the upperclassmen who were taunting me were just really funny. So I mostly get in trouble for laughing at them. So that's Becky. Anyhow, so she goes through her military service and then she's looking for something to do after she's in the military, is a captain for seven or eight years. And she gets involved in the homelessness problem. It's very serious, of course, in the United States. Eventually, she led a campaign that found homes for 100,000 homeless Americans and has done all this stuff. But one of the things that she learned in the military was that when something went wrong, and she has the story that she kind of wakes up her commanding officer at three in the morning, and she looks at Becky blearily, and Becky describes the problem. And the commanding officer says, well, who's fucking this chicken, which is apparently military speak for who is in charge of fixing this thing. And so then fast forward to the 100,000 homes campaign that Becky and her team is trying to get people all over the country to actually find homes for homeless people, because that was her definition of success. Homeless person put them in a home that counts as one. So, and there were some folks where people would just talk and talk and talk and do nothing. She called them hollow Easter bunnies, you know, the kind of people that the worst that people use talk as a substitute for action. They're bullshit. And she started giving this little speech about who's fucking this chicken. And people love that speech. And so they, so they gave this award to people who actually got stuff done, which was they and they gave them a little tin chicken, a rooster, actually, because that's what fucks with chicken is a rooster, right? That's my understanding of how these things work. And so anyway, so that's that's Becky and Becky is totally a character. I mean, and now she's helping other large nonprofits, like the Gates Foundation with other sorts of large scale change, but that's Becky. And so in the lesson in sort of without the obscenities is that in organizations that are good at fixing friction, rather than using talk as a substitute for action. So the bullshit, the plans, the meetings, the speeches, the training, which is all nice. And it does motivate action. But when it becomes a substitute for actually doing stuff, that's when we start having a red flag that we're, you know, just spooking out nonsense and not actually getting stuff done. I remember having a, we had an employee who always wanted to have the meeting after the meeting to discuss the meeting. I'm like, well, we just, I don't, and I'm like, look at him. How do you think that this is rational or going to help us move forward? But this brings up a very good point. I would think in some of these companies where there are so many employees, there are people who are causing messes. So they have something to do or something to talk about or to have a meeting about so they can actually get a chicken fucker to come fix the thing that they are, the mess that they are making. Well, well, yeah, yes. Yeah. So, so, so we, the general disease we call this addition sickness. And we have a chapter in addition sickness. And in general, there's a bunch of academic psychological research that show that we, you and beings naturally are wired to solve problems by adding rather than subtracting complexity. That's standard. But then organizations reward people who do that too. And, and the classic thing that I'm just thinking of you describing the person, I can have that picture in my mind. I think all of us have this standard bureaucrat. And, and, but what happens is with addition sickness in a place like Stanford University or Google, same problem right now is that if you want to get paid more, you build the biggest possible fiefdom of people, let's just say who are bean counters. Let's just use this as an example. And when they're bean counters, like what, the more of them there are, like the more work they're going to create for one another in for you, because obviously whenever I submit my expenses, I always do something wrong, or I go $1.50 over some category never heard of. So therefore we, it has to go back four times. And so, so this idea about, about bureaucracies creating work for one another is one of the problems. But to be optimistic, you know, we've been bitching a lot and I do love bitching. But to be optimistic, there are organizations where this is just intolerable where people who waste people's time and waste people's money, they actually are not glorified. And two that I would pick actually three. One is Walmart. And Walmart is like whatever, you know, it is so tightly ran. It is just amazing. I mean, they are, maybe they should pay their employees a little bit more. But I'm talking about the bottom. But my God, they are so efficient about not wasting people time. They have they have a very sort of simple structure and they're the largest private employer in the United States. They only have eight hierarchical levels. I mean, that's kind of amazing. I think Google has probably like 29 or something. I'm probably making this up. But there are organizations that do this well, also Apple, which is very good about not over hiring people or overloading people. And in Amazon too, those are some of the ones I know that actually find ways to avoid unnecessary friction. And they're not perfect. Nothing's nobody's perfect. Well, to transition from the bitching. So I think for a lot of us when we think about friction, it feels negative, right? We don't want to slow down. We don't want friction in our lives. We want to be friction-free and efficient and enjoying ourselves. But there are cases and instances where friction is actually a good thing. So let's speak about the positives of friction. So I love that question. The analogy that I've been using lately and this feels right is like you're a NASCAR or a Formula One fan. The people who win the races are not the people who put the pedal to the metal and never take it off. Because if you do that, well, you don't make it around the first turn, you got to hit the brakes. And then you do have to take a pit stop occasionally to sort of recharge. So if you use that as sort of analogy, there's time when you need to hit the gas, times when you need to hit the brake. The classic time when you need to hit the brakes, if you look at the research we've done and the behavioral sciences in general, are when you don't know what to do. So you're really confused. That's a situation, as long as the plane's not crashing or the patient's not squirting blood like crazy. That's a point where you kind of got to slow down and figure out what to do before you do something stupid. And we have lots of examples of startups. One is Waze, where the CEO sort of figured out let's stop hiring, let's stop doing any product development, let's just take a few weeks and figure out what's going on. And Waze is a good example. They did that for six weeks and then they hit the gas after they figured it out and started hiring, doing more product development. So that's one part. And another thing which I really got interested in recently is there's some interesting studies out in Germany that where they, there's old studies that showed that the higher people's IQs are, the faster they solve problems. This turns out to not be quite right. The new research shows that really smart people solve simple problems quickly, but complex problems more slowly because they slow down to figure out what the hell's going on and glue all the complexity together. And in the analogy we have for organizational life is if it's a really complicated problem, like a quick, easy fix probably isn't going to work. So that's two, and then I'll throw in one more and then see what else you want to talk about is, and I love talking to John about being in Columbia. You actually just, you just sort of lived this, this notion. There's this really cool research on this notion of savoring. So it's the notion that there's research on coping, which is, oh, things are terrible. How do I avoid having that ruin my life? But savoring is people with good mental health, they slow down and they enjoy the good stuff in life. They pause to reflect about what's wonderful or to anticipate, then maybe spend a few minutes saying, oh, oh, dinner is just going to be great tonight rather than just rushing to dinner. So that's another thing that I think good leaders do is they get people to slow down to appreciate whatever, whatever they're doing and to take pride in their work. So that's the other sort of part of adding some friction that we've gotten pretty obsessed with lately. So friction is something that a lot of us are like, avoid, let's try to become more efficient. But sometimes without that friction, we can make the wrong decision, misguided decisions. And you have a great example of Google glasses. So I know about 10 years ago, I was at a music festival and saw this guy walking around with this device on his eyes and kind of pointed and laughed with my friends. And of course it became a big joke in Silicon Valley. But this was something that was near and dear to Sergey Brin's heart. He wanted this thing to be the future and moved fast, took all Google's resources and threw it at this problem without any friction. And it was a major flop. It's kind of interesting because I will give my book to various people to read early. And one of the people I gave it to last week, and she said, oh, this is just a great book. And then she writes me back, oh, shit, I was on the Google Glass team. Did you have to go after us? But what happened, according to her report in the New York Times, is that it's a product development team. And this is consistent with the notion that creativity can take a long time and be messy. And it's hard to rush creativity too much. But what happened is the team didn't think it was ready. But there's this old thing of a don't show stupid people unfinished work. And I'm not saying that what Sergey Brin is generally stupid, but I think he had a moment of stupidity and possibly arrogance here. And he got overly excited with this product. And they're like, no, no, no, it's not ready. Yeah, yeah, it is. And he ripped it out of their hands. And the rest is history. It was total failure. So that's something where you have, when people have too much power and not enough friction stopping them, it can be a problem. So is there an equilibrium? We talked a lot about bureaucracies and things growing at such a scale where we're just creating busy work. Is there a lean mindset that we should take? And is there too lean where we remove all friction and then get those negative results? I like that in some ways, that's a great question. So the question is, what's the sort of optimal one? I don't know whether this is to be self critical or realistic. But I don't think that there's any management book or any how to book on earth that you can just take it, read it, and then your life is cured. To me, what I tend to view a book like mine or almost any book that I read that I think is useful, it's sort of like my life is a series of meals that I put together. And gee, this might be a nice menu to help me assemble various meals. And to me, that's how I think of it. And I think it is presumptuous of me to tell the leaders, managers of anybody who's ever had a job in this to how to do their job, because I can't know enough about it. Maybe some of the principles like adopting this subtraction mindset or slowing down to save your life. Those things might help you in specific instances. But well, I don't want to talk about it too much, but you said a little technical problem. I don't think my book can help you solve it. I think that you had to figure with your team. But to me, that's the classic sort of things that I don't want to overclaim. I think that what is an awful equilibrium does help. And in some of the analogies, one that really helps me a lot, which I've already said once, is this idea of think of yourself as being a NASCAR or Formula One racer. You don't go full speed the entire time. And even like a friend of mine, Andy Papa, he used to head, he was like a pit crew head in Hendricks Motorsports. And then he was like the athletic director that had like eight different pit crews. And he said what we figured out was the teams that tried to go the absolute fastest were not usually the best because what they do is they'd have four pit stops that were like five seconds. And then they'd have one that was 11 seconds. So what you want is consistency. So that's a case where he talks about more rhythm and pace rather than going completely pedal to the metal because when you're hairy, you tend to make mistakes. But I don't know the exact optimal amount of going slow versus fast when it comes to a pit stop, but Andy does. So recognizing that a lot of this is to raise awareness both on the negative and the positive impacts of friction. So you can have these conversations with your team members. And as you're trying to solve problems, recognize that those two things can exist. We can move too fast and get negative results or we can bog ourselves down being too slow and not have enough chicken efforts in place to help us move things forward. Yeah, I love that. And just as a little addendum, I would add in the most constructive, at least teams and organizations that I've been part of, when the problem gets solved, it's because people aren't just pointing fingers at others. They're taking a look in the mirror, which is we're back to self-awareness, which John has brought up. So when we look at ourselves and our career, a big part of our audience wants to accelerate things, wants to get promoted, wants to move into these leadership roles, but they might not be in a leadership role just yet. So they're feeling the friction, but they may not feel that they have much control over the friction. So what advice do you have for someone at that stage of their career where they're in a very friction-filled situation and they want to move up to leadership? What are some of the best things they can do to become a friction fixer and get that career success they're looking for? To me, there's two parts of that, that if you are on a team where you have colleagues and a boss who, when you go to them, when you do good things, even when you criticize them nicely and say, we can fix it, to me, that's the sign. If your boss is being receptive, then you're probably okay. But if you are in a situation, and this kind of somebody goes back to the no asshole role, when I talk to my students who do well in their careers versus not so well, the ones who do well, if they're in good situations, they stay in them and they keep making them better. But one of my favorite expressions is quitting is underrated. And if you are in a situation, this isn't just about friction, I mean, where you give a real authentic sort of effort and are trying to help and either you're being ignored or disrespected for doing it, then gee, you might start looking for another job. So to me, a lot of it is picking your context. And I realize that many people, you know, they might be in a situation where it's harder to find a job and they, I'm not saying they should quit immediately. But just every student I've had over years, the smart ones know when to leave. So recognizing that that environment and context is so key to your success and being a friction fixer, or could create a lot of needless friction in your life and stress. Part of that to me seems not only having the interview process and doing a great job, but then talking to your new potential team members about how do they handle friction on the team? And how are those things seen by superiors so that if it's seen in a good light and there seems to be upward mobility tied to fixing friction, that's a great place for you. But if it seems like the team is recognizing friction, can't do anything about it, then maybe we have an asshole boss on our hands and we don't want to put ourselves in that situation. Or they're just incompetent. And I would also add that my wife was master of this during the years she was a lawyer and stuff, that the best people often for finding out whether or not you want to work for that person is to talk to somebody who used to work for them. Because they are more likely to tell you the truth. I have a couple friends who got fired by Elon Musk. I think they give you very accurate information about what it's like working for him. And it ain't pretty. Yeah, recognizing that oftentimes the reason people leave is because it is that situation that you don't want to be putting yourself in. Or they get fired for doing something instructive. Yeah. That's not seen well. Well, there's another aspect of that too, which all of these companies are going to have a particular culture. That culture either has been set up because everything else was neglected. And that's the culture that built around that neglected. Or it was intentional to build a specific culture that would induce a certain type of productivity that would serve that company very well. You're not going to be suited for all of those companies. And in the book, there's a wonderful example. I believe it was Google where the interview process eventually got so out of hand that people were going up to 20-some interviews and wondering what is going on, which is utterly ridiculous. Now, as somebody who is interviewing, you need to start to take notice that if you're on your 10th interview, you might be wanting to look at it. It might be a lot of friction. It might be a lot of friction. And it's not going to be the culture that you want to be entering in if you're looking for the fast track to leadership. Well, so that example, this is from Laszlo Bach. He's the, well, he was basically head of HR for about 10 years at Google. And I've had him fact check this multiple times. And this is, to me, a beautiful example of using good friction to get rid of bad friction. They had a tradition, which actually made sense in the early days when they had a few hundred people of, they'd interviewed a lot of people for both technical skill and are these the people we can grow a great company with? So it was actually, they were really, really picky in the early days. And that made sense. But then it became a tradition that what is it, what got you here, won't get you there. John, to your point, they were doing, and I remember fact checking the first time for the Wall Street Journal, I said five, 10, 12 interviews and the Laszlo said 25 once at 25 interviews. Just imagine the scheduling for whoever is scheduling that and imagine the poor candidate. And so Laszlo just put in the simple rule. If you need to do more than four interviews for a job candidate, you have to write me to get written approval. So that's friction. It's good friction that got rid of bad friction. And he said that the excessive use of interviews dropped almost immediately. But that's a case where a little bit more mindfulness is also part of that too. For the candidate's position, you know, Google's a very prestigious job not only as how he's benefits and perks, but it can really set you up for a career success. So there's going to be a ton of candidates who are willing to do 27 interviews and never give that feedback and never quit. So internally for Google, they're like, well, we're still getting candidates showing up for the 26th interview. So where's the friction? So that was probably true when Google had about 1000 employees and was the coolest employer in Silicon Valley. But one of the reasons Laszlo had to put this rule in is, well, actually during that era, Facebook was the coolest employer. Everybody has their moment, the coolest employer. And, you know, people would do two interviews and get a job at Facebook and they take it and they just leave the Google process. So when you're the coolest kid on the block, you can get away with abusing people a little bit more, I think. Yeah, the prestige covered up a lot of the friction internally. So you mentioned this concept of power poisoning in the book and I would love to unpack that for our audience and what we can do if we're experiencing that. This is one of the things that I've been studying in various guises for years. But there's all of this behavioral science evidence, I'll talk about two. One is a lot of times when people get in positions of power, they don't have to struggle with the little inconveniences that the rest of us do. You know, at the top of like a giant bank or something, you might have your own private plane and all that sort of stuff. But it even might be little things like we talk about the moment, the notion of General Motors that employees down to a fairly low level, they don't have to deal with the hassle of buying a car. So that's one thing is that one of the things that causes friction blindness is that when people get power, they don't understand the inconveniences that their customers and other employees go through. That's one thing. The other thing is there's a bunch of evidence that when we get in positions of power, something happens to our brain. This guy, Dr. Keltner, who wrote the book called The Power Paradox, got it right here. He even has made the argument that when people get power, it's almost like they have brain damage. And what they do is they focus more on their own needs, less on the needs of others and they act like the rules don't apply to them. And he's done all these studies where the fancier, the more expensive the car people drive, the less likely they are to let pedestrians go by at the stop walk, all this sort of crazy stuff. The danger when people are in power is they just, they just don't pay much attention to what happens to people, less power. And there's also this thing, just think about a baboon and a troupe. So in a baboon troupe or in any organization, attention is devoted up the hierarchy. So in the baboon, they look at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds, because that dude can really hurt him or really help him, right? And that's kind of like that. So the problem with power poisoning is we aren't as aware about how our actions impose friction on other people. And just the classic thing, and we start the book with this, the first paragraph is a senior Stanford administrator wrote a like 2000 word email with a 7000 word attachment and sent it to 2000 or so employees. And being the obnoxious well person I can be sometime I started complaining to her boss, when I sent her an edit and said, gee, this could have been a let's do the math. Suppose this was only 1000 words. So it was 1266 words. And I said it could have been 600. And I don't know why we needed such a long attachment. And to me that that's that sort of awareness that when you're in a position of power, you don't actually know what's going on. And one of my favorite stupid examples in the book, I heard about this from the executive assistant for a CEO of a Fortune 10 company. I don't know very many, but I ran into this woman once, and she told me the blueberry muffin story. Okay, so here's her boss. He goes to early meeting. And he just says casually some breakfast meeting. Where's the blueberry muffins? That's all he said, you know, it was like small talk. Then for the rest of his life, everywhere he went, there was piles of blueberry muffins because it was in the notes. Don't forget the blueberry muffins loves blueberry muffins. And to me, that's like, I just imagine all these poor caters and assistants running around for years, just trying to find blueberry muffins when they were hard to get. And it does you like blueberry brand or who knows what the heck's going on. But to me, that's an example that when people are in positions of power, they're in danger of being oblivious to the effects of their actions on others. So recognizing that self-awareness around, okay, I'm in this new position of power, my brain actually changes, my behavior and style of interaction changes. And there are all these downstream consequences that either structurally, I'm just not aware of because my life has gotten a little bit easier. I can park closer to the building, I have a larger stipend, I can fly business. And also looking upward, right? So that assistant doesn't want to be in another room where there's no blueberry muffins because now her job is on the line. So what can we do to be the antidote to that power poisoning if we ourselves might now be in a new leadership role? So this is back to John's stuff on self-awareness. And there's lots of ways to get self-awareness. One of my favorite ones, and this is a CEO of a non-profit that I worked with for a bit, and it's very successful. And she had this philosophy of at least she said in every office she'd ever worked in. She also had ran a large law firm, so she had a lot of those too. She said, there's always one or two people who complain constantly are known gossips. And she said, there's always going to be one. If you think you can get rid of one, you're living in a fool's paradise. And she said, so first of all, I become friends with that person so I can get the information from them and create psychological safety so they can complain to me. And then the other thing she said, which is more sneaky, is that if you become friends with that person, you can influence the gossip stream. Because they're your friend. But I liked the idea in that we have a whole bunch of other standard stuff in the book that you've heard of. One classic one is to the extent you can like shadow employees or work along with poise and understand the journey that they're going through. We have the example of a high school principal from New York City and she was constantly saying, and this is friction that why are all my students late? They're lazy. They gossip. They're smoking dope. I mean, they're on their phones, all the stuff that happens in high school, right? And so she started shadowing students. And she said, it wasn't their fault, it was our fault. And I remember her telling the stories in Chicago. And she said, so I followed this girl. She had a class in the basement. Her faculty member kept her two minutes late. She had three minutes to get up to the top floor, which was a seventh story building. She had like run up this, and she had to change her tampon. So this is like, it was no way she was going to make it. And so then what the principal did, she said, well, we started cracking down on teachers who kept students late. So that's changing. And the other thing is we gave them seven minutes rather than five minutes to go between classes. And I thought that was a pretty good example of her thinking that it was a student's fault, when in fact it was structural friction that was in the system. So it sounds like raising that awareness is especially in a position of power is ingratiating yourselves and creating that open line of communication with a potential gossip or someone who has all the information, but also just putting yourself in other roles from time to time to sit in another seat and experience the friction from another angle or another view to bring your awareness to it. Yeah. And I think that's why very often, sometimes the best leaders, I'm thinking, I bathed General Motors, so I'll say they're a great CEO, Mary Barra. She's had every difference. Her last job was head of HR, but before that, she was head of product development. Before that, she was head of manufacturing. And before that, she ran a plant. So somebody like that who's a CEO, they're not just from finance. They know how the whole thing sort of glues together. And I think that those sort of people, it's great to be able to have empathy for other folks if you don't have their expertise. So I should not practice doing heart surgery tomorrow. For example, I'd kill people. But the idea of also having people understanding how the organization as a whole works is really important. So in your research for this book, and it was a seven-year project, was there anything that was really sort of you going in a preconceived notion around friction that shifted after doing these interviews and doing this research? If I would pick a preconceived notion, it was my bias that when it comes to government, I had two biases. One was unfixable, and two, the people who worked there didn't care. The more that I learned, actually, the opposite is true. At least in many cases. I already talked to some about the Department of Border Vehicles at Sanford and how much the employees care about making things better. And one of my favorite examples in the book, there's a nonprofit in Michigan called Sevilla. And the folks at Sevilla were very upset because it's a benefits form that 2.5 million people in Michigan complete to get things like food, financial assistance, health insurance, and so forth. And it was 1,000 questions long, 42 pages long. My favorite question was, when was your child conceived? And it was a really difficult form to fill out. And in the folks at Sevilla, what they did was they started working with the government, including the people who ran the agency, to fix the form. And the people who in the agency were embarrassed about it. They actually just didn't quite know how to do it. And then they started working with citizens and they did a whole bunch of prototypes. And now if you fast forward the same form, it's been modified massively. Your audience can look it up. It's project reform. It's 80% shorter. And people make far fewer mistakes. It puts far less administrative burden on the system. And that was a case where everybody wanted to work together to fix the form. And to me, when I first heard, because I actually met the guy, Michael Brennan, who's a CEO of it before he started working on the form, he literally got on the ground and rolled out the form and said, I'm going to fix this. And I say, I just met him. Who the hell are you? You meet somebody in three minutes. He's on his hands. He's knees. He's rolling out this thing. And it was one of those things where it actually was possible, both the optimism and the fact that government can change. And so I guess if the state of Michigan can do it, maybe the rest of us can do it too. So that's some of the things that sort of changes. I felt better about the possibilities of fixing things because we started out very pessimistic in this project. And we got more and more optimistic as it went on. Yeah. I think for us internally, one of the things that we've noticed sort of two trends, the trend to automation and bringing more technology in with the hope of becoming more efficient and now adding AI into the mix. I think a lot of people have blind spots around friction with technology and how it interacts with team members. And obviously we've talked about a lot of different factors in that, but I'm really curious your perspective around AI and how it might create or impact friction in an organization. Well, what is it? I'm being very careful not to parade myself as an AI expert. Even the number of people I know have become instant AI experts is kind of cracking me up. I didn't know anything about AI until three months ago. But I do try to hang out with people who I think are actual AI experts. And here's what they tell me. So there's a woman I'm working with, her name's Rebecca Heinz. She's head of the work innovation lab at Asan. And is doing a bunch of research. This is going back for six or seven years about AI implementations. And the thing that she is finding about AI implementations, and this is like the racetrack analogy we're talking about again, is if you just throw the technology, the people and say, if you don't start learning how to do it immediately, you're stupid. And this is happening in some organizations, I'm sorry, but it is. But if you take the time to work with them to both gain their acceptance and show them how it works, and also to make your AI tools so that rather than having them be confused about how to improve their jobs, that the AI tools are modified to actually become assistance for their jobs. So the tools become better. So that's essentially sort of slow down both to have the iterative discussion between the people who do the work and the people develop the AI tools and get their acceptance. That's where it seems to work. And by the way, to say something good about Microsoft, Microsoft, despite all the sort of, it seems like AI tools have appeared immediately, they've been very conscious, very clear about moving slowly with open AI to bring it in at a speed that they believe will not overwhelm us as users, will not cause legal problems, will not cause ethical problems. And there is some tension between open AI and Microsoft that open AI wants to go faster than Microsoft, but I think it's a constructive tension. So to me, that's the thing that I'm thinking about about AI is that I think if we do it with a little bit of awareness and knowing when hit the gas and knowing the breaks, I think they're going to be pretty good. And this is straight out of Microsoft strategy. This is something they're public about. And so I have some hope. Bob, we'd love to hear one key takeaway that you wish the readers and our audience would implement from the Friction Project. Well, let's be really specific. My favorite method that's in the book, which was developed with the aforementioned Rebecca Hines at the Asana Work Innovation Lab, is this meeting reset tool. Essentially, all that she did was have 60 Asana employees go through their standing meetings in their calendars and rate them in terms of how important they were and how much work they were. And then it turned out that about 20% of their meetings were really a lot of work, but not very important. And then she worked with them to eliminate some of them, to make them less frequent, to make them smaller, to replace some of the emails. And the average employee saved about four hours a month. And I don't think this is in Harvard Business Review and it's in our book and stuff. Your audience can look it up. But to me, I think it's a pretty simple thing that I could do right now is I could just look at the standing meetings in my calendar and just sort of that I have in the next two months and just sort of rate them. And that might be just a little tool that might help them. Yeah, I think we'd all be happy to get four hours a month back. Yeah, meetings. Yeah, an hour a week. Thank you so much for joining us, Bob. This is a pleasure. And where can our audience find out more about you and the Friction Project and the work that you do? I think if you just go to bobsutton.net, which is my website, you can find it. And, you know, the books on Amazon, it's book that'll be everywhere. And I think that's the main places to sort of go. Just bobsutton.net is where most of the major things about me are sort of hiding. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. Thanks so much. Thanks, John. Thanks, AJ.