0:39

What do good leaders do? How do they motivate, create

0:41

efficiencies and connect

0:44

the dots to paint a clear,

0:44

big picture for their

0:46

employees and fellow leaders

0:46

within an organization?

0:50

The answer may be to create

0:50

a bit of the right kind of

0:54

friction from time to time. Welcome to the People

0:55

Managing People podcast.

0:58

We're on a mission to build a

0:58

better world of work and help

1:00

you create happy, healthy,

1:00

and productive workplaces.

1:04

I'm your host, David Rice. My guest today is Robert Sutton.

1:08

He's an organizational

1:08

psychologist and professor

1:10

of management science in the

1:10

Stanford Engineering School.

1:14

He's also the author of a

1:14

new book called "The Friction

1:16

Project - How Smart Leaders

1:16

Make the Right Things Easier

1:20

and the Wrong Things Harder". We're going to take a look

1:21

at the ideas of good friction

1:24

and bad friction in the

1:24

workplace and discuss some

1:27

of the core concepts of the

1:27

book that leaders and managers

1:29

can apply to help their teams

1:29

thrive through good friction.

1:37

So, Bob, welcome. It's good to have

1:38

you on the show.

1:39

It's great to be here. Nice to meet you, David.

1:42

So I want to start

1:42

with what inspired the book.

1:45

You mentioned it in the opening

1:45

of the book, but for our

1:47

listeners, can you describe

1:47

some of the extent of some

1:50

of the things that you were

1:50

seeing that made you feel like

1:52

this needed to be written?

1:53

There was sort

1:53

of two things; one was

1:56

rational and the other

1:56

one was more emotional.

1:58

And the rational one is that

1:58

my coworker, co-conspirator,

2:03

whatever, what you call them,

2:03

Huggy Rao on this adventure,

2:05

we wrote a book, oh God, life

2:05

goes fast, 2014 on scaling.

2:11

And so it's all these

2:11

organizations we worked with to

2:14

name some of them, Google now

2:14

Alphabet, Facebook now Meta,

2:18

they're changing their names. They got so big. Salesforce, these companies we

2:20

know in the Bay area that we

2:24

knew them when they were little. And when you talk to everybody

2:26

we know who's worked there

2:28

a long time, they talk about

2:28

how it gets harder and harder

2:30

to get things done as they

2:30

get larger and more complex.

2:33

So that was one of the causes

2:33

of us writing the book.

2:36

The other one was more emotional

2:36

that in our interactions with

2:40

people in the classroom and

2:40

the companies that we work with

2:44

just in our lives, people would

2:44

just talk about how hard it

2:47

was to get simple things done,

2:47

things like walking in muck.

2:51

I work in a frustration factory.

2:53

And I remember this middle

2:53

manager saying to us,

2:57

essentially, I feel like

2:57

I'm living in a world of

3:00

shit and they expect me

3:00

to show some initiative.

3:03

And so we got interested in the

3:03

bad news and we can talk about

3:06

the good news in a little bit

3:06

but it was the bad news that

3:09

got us going and it was the

3:09

optimism that kept us going.

3:12

So when we hear

3:12

the word friction in an

3:14

organizational sense, most

3:14

people cringe and they think

3:16

of those bad experiences like

3:16

we're talking about, but there

3:19

is such a good thing as good

3:19

friction that helps us build

3:22

things, create better products. So can you tell us a little

3:23

bit more about, what good

3:25

friction looks like and how to

3:25

replicate it when we see it?

3:28

That's something we've really been thinking about a lot, continuing with

3:30

this theme that when the

3:33

project started, which is like

3:33

friction's bad, and if something

3:35

is hard to do, or if it's a

3:35

struggle or feels difficult.

3:40

But then, we started looking

3:40

at the actual evidence and

3:43

there are certain things that

3:43

are hard to do and should be

3:46

hard to do, and we think about

3:46

the notion of a related point

3:50

when speed is your enemy. And to give you just two or

3:52

three things that should be

3:55

hard and slow, that when you

3:55

don't know what to do as a

3:58

leader team, it's better to

3:58

hit the brakes and to figure

4:03

out what the heck is going

4:03

on rather than rush ahead

4:06

and to make a decision. Which is we see this over

4:08

and over and over again,

4:12

where people make impulsive

4:12

decisions and then they're

4:15

sorry later, especially

4:15

when they're irreversible.

4:17

That would be one example. And it's good to slow down. The second thing is just the

4:20

research on creativity and I've

4:23

been studying and following the

4:23

literature on creativity for

4:27

some 25 years and the evidence

4:27

for creativity is it's just

4:30

a messy, inefficient process. And I mean, we may see

4:32

just in this era where like

4:35

ChatGPT and these large

4:35

language models and everything

4:37

and people are working on

4:37

variations of this for decades.

4:41

Although maybe it's happening faster than they thought, but that means

4:43

that it's happening 10 years

4:46

faster than they thought. And so creativity is a difficult

4:47

process and one of my favorite

4:50

quotes in the book, I can't

4:50

believe this, Jerry Seinfeld,

4:54

the comedian got interviewed

4:54

by Harvard Business Review,

4:57

which is the most unlikely

4:57

thing I can think of as it is.

5:00

But, and it's this really funny

5:00

interview and they ask him,

5:03

they said so you and Larry

5:03

David, you did all the writing

5:06

yourself and you got so burned

5:06

out, you had to end the episode.

5:09

And they said, could McKinsey help you? And then he asked

5:11

him, who's McKinsey?

5:14

And then they tell him, and

5:14

then he says, are they funny?

5:16

They say no. And then he said,

5:17

I don't want them.

5:20

The hard way is the right way. If you're doing it efficient

5:22

and you're doing it wrong, and I think that that applies

5:24

in all sorts of settings.

5:27

And, I haven't heard yet. So one of my favorite books

5:28

ever, Creativity Incorporated

5:32

by Ed Catmull, which I would

5:32

nominate as the best, certainly

5:35

the best creativity and business

5:35

book ever written, possibly the

5:38

best business book ever written. So Ed, who we got to know pretty

5:40

well over the last 15 years.

5:44

If you talk to Ed about

5:44

efficiency in making films at

5:47

Pixar, he just gets confused

5:47

because it's just irrelevant.

5:51

His perspective is we just keep iterating until it's good enough.

5:54

And we have high standards

5:54

that, and then just as a

5:56

final one in this area of

5:56

move fast and break things.

6:00

That there's quite good evidence

6:00

in academia, the faster people

6:04

go, especially the faster the

6:04

corporate culture and the more

6:07

in a hurry they're in, the

6:07

more likely they are to cheat.

6:10

And we certainly see that with

6:10

Elizabeth Holmes, a dropout

6:14

of my own university, Sam

6:14

Baikman Freed, I think some

6:17

of that was going on there

6:17

with the cryptocurrency.

6:20

And so those are just some of

6:20

the times when you want to slow

6:24

down and make things difficult. Oh, and gee, by the way, for

6:25

people interested in long

6:28

term relationships, whether

6:28

it's love or whether it's,

6:32

emotional attachment to the

6:32

team, the longer people work

6:35

together and the more they

6:35

struggle, the better it is.

6:38

And of course, Warren Buffett

6:38

and Charlie Munger, they've been

6:41

working together since 1965. That seems to be

6:43

working pretty well. And The Supremes, I love

6:45

this, that Supreme song - You

6:48

Can’t Hurry Love, that's

6:48

empirically correct.

6:50

So there's just some times

6:50

when you got to slow down

6:52

and struggle a little bit. And finally, I already said

6:54

finally, once one of my favorite

6:57

things, which I just got

6:57

interested in this research,

7:00

just as we're finishing the

7:00

book, there's this research

7:02

on savoring and there's all

7:02

these great things in life.

7:06

Eating a great meal,

7:06

making love, like figure

7:09

out what you want. Like when you rush them,

7:10

they're not as good. So this idea of slowing down and

7:12

sort of savoring the good things

7:15

in life, you want those to be

7:15

a little bit inefficient too.

7:18

So anyway, so those are

7:18

just some of the things

7:21

that sort of struck us that there's all, there are advantages to good friction.

7:24

And we think of the gas and

7:24

the brakes a lot of times.

7:27

Sometimes you got to hit the brakes and sometimes you got to hit the gas.

7:29

That's interesting. You know, cause like I

7:30

always think about, we talk

7:32

all the time about like objectives, key results, goals, all these things.

7:35

Right? And every meaningful thing

7:35

I think I've ever done it's

7:39

always like the journey was

7:39

the part, not necessarily

7:41

the end destination. The journey had all the

7:42

lessons and the value and

7:44

the growth and the things

7:44

that I learned, you know?

7:47

So maybe it's kind of the same thing.

7:49

It's funny you

7:49

say that because, so this

7:52

is my 8th business ebook and

7:52

gee, I hope people buy it.

7:55

And you know, I want them

7:55

to listen to this show and

7:57

I want them to get excited. I want them to go and buy it. But first of all, it

7:59

took me years to love the

8:02

process of writing it. And now since part of

8:03

promoting a book, I get to meet

8:07

interesting people like you and I just try to enjoy the process and whatever happens,

8:08

happens with the outcome.

8:11

Because I can't control

8:11

the outcome anyways, and

8:13

I can control a little bit of the process. So, but yeah, that's true.

8:18

In the book, you

8:18

refer to friction fixers as a

8:21

trustee of other people's time. And I really like that.

8:24

Particularly, there's this

8:24

section about poser tricks

8:27

or hollow acts that undermine

8:27

friction fixing as I read

8:31

that, but I couldn't help but

8:31

feel like, wow, I've had a

8:34

lot of these things done to

8:34

me by bad managers over the

8:37

years, particularly people

8:37

searching for someone to blame.

8:41

So I'm curious, what are

8:41

some memorable examples that

8:43

you've seen of those tricks?

8:45

You and I both have

8:45

been victims and maybe even

8:48

some of the perpetrators of

8:48

this stuff because it's hard

8:50

to get through organizational

8:50

life without doing it to other

8:52

people, even accidentally. I'm sure that I've accidentally

8:54

wasted a lot of my students

8:56

time over the years. But the way that I got

8:58

interested in this, it

9:00

actually goes way back to my

9:00

very first business book with

9:03

my co-author, Jeff Pfeffer,

9:03

The Knowing-Doing Gap.

9:07

And we have a chapter there

9:07

that's about using talk as

9:09

a substitute for action or

9:09

the smart talk trap is what

9:12

we eventually called it. So the way I got interested

9:14

in this was my, this is my

9:16

very first consulting job ever

9:16

with a top management team.

9:20

This is long time ago. This is 25 years ago or so.

9:23

And I would fly to the

9:23

Midwest to this big

9:25

manufacturing corporation. I watch the senior

9:27

team in action.

9:30

And the thing that I remember

9:30

most is that they kept making

9:33

the same decision over and

9:33

over, and the decision was

9:38

to put the name of their product on their product. I don't think this is

9:40

a trivial decision. And the other thing I

9:42

realized after about three meetings is they weren't

9:44

writing anything down. And they would not start

9:46

meetings by saying, well, what

9:50

did we decide last time and

9:50

what should we do this time?

9:53

And I just realized that

9:53

they were just using talk

9:55

as a substitute for action. That for them, just saying

9:56

smart things in meetings was

9:59

how you got ahead and not to

9:59

bash the management consultants.

10:02

A lot of them, my best friends

10:02

are management consultants

10:04

and I'm a management consultant sometimes. But I think the fact that there

10:07

was one or two manufacturing

10:10

people in 10 management

10:10

consultants on the former

10:13

management consultants in the

10:13

top team was related to that.

10:16

Because my friends are in management consultants when they give you their advice and

10:17

they just leave, they're done.

10:20

That's what they sell. And so that's how I got

10:21

interested in the Jeff

10:23

Pfeffer and I wrote about

10:23

the smart talk trap.

10:26

And then eventually we saw

10:26

that friction fixers are

10:29

not people who talk about

10:29

what should be done or

10:32

come up with flashy ideas. They actually focus

10:33

on implementation.

10:35

I don't like that word execution. That reminds me of a capital

10:37

punishment or something.

10:40

But they do focus on

10:40

implementing on a talk

10:42

that motivates action. So people who are friction

10:44

fixers are people who actually do stuff.

10:47

And that's why we talked about

10:47

my friend, Becky Margiotta,

10:51

US army officer, and she

10:51

led a movement that found

10:55

homes for a hundred thousand

10:55

homeless Americans, a hundred

10:57

thousand homes campaign. And as we talk about in the

10:58

book that they figured out

11:01

there was a difference between the posers and the doers. They called them chicken

11:03

effers because when Becky was a captain, there's

11:05

something that was messed up.

11:08

Her colonel would say to her,

11:08

who's this chicken, which meant

11:12

whose responsibility is it

11:12

to fix it and who can fix it?

11:15

And so she gave this little

11:15

metal rooster as a reward

11:19

to people in the campaign

11:19

who actually found homes

11:22

for homeless people. That was a definition of

11:23

action in this campaign versus she called them

11:25

hollow Easter bunnies. Those are the people who would

11:27

show up at meetings and just

11:29

talk and talk and talk and

11:29

never actually implement it.

11:31

So that to us for getting

11:31

rid of friction, people who

11:34

actually do stuff are important.

11:36

You have this in the book, there's this help pyramid and at the

11:38

bottom three levels, they're

11:41

really more of about helping

11:41

people deal with friction

11:45

in healthy ways, whereas the

11:45

top two levels are really

11:47

more focused on preventing

11:47

and curing friction troubles.

11:51

I want to do a little back

11:51

and forth around these,

11:54

if that's all right. Cause what I'll do is I'll

11:54

say a term and if you could

11:57

give us a short anecdote or

11:57

story about some of the most

12:00

interesting or ridiculous

12:00

examples you've seen of this.

12:03

So we'll start with

12:03

executive magnification.

12:06

I was raised as an

12:06

organizational theorist that,

12:09

Oh, when you're at the top,

12:09

leaders are always complaining

12:11

about resistance to change. Oh, they're, I don't know,

12:13

I'm implementing a quality

12:15

movement or design thinking. And it's the right thing to

12:17

do and they're not doing it. But one of the things, and

12:19

there's very good evidence

12:21

about this, it's just how

12:21

baboon troops work too, that

12:25

when you're in a hierarchy,

12:25

people pay really a lot of

12:27

attention to the top dogs

12:27

because they can do wonderful

12:31

and terrible things to us. So you watch them

12:32

really closely. So the baboon literature is

12:34

that the, in a baboon troop,

12:37

the average troop member

12:37

looks up at the alpha male

12:40

every 30 or 40 seconds because

12:40

they can hurt them, they can

12:42

help them, they can bring them food, blah, blah, blah. So if you bring this

12:45

into hierarchical life,

12:47

there's all these examples. And we have some long examples

12:48

in the book of executives who

12:52

entire movement started because

12:52

they complained about something,

12:55

but perhaps my favorite one was

12:55

the CEO of a fortune 10 company.

13:00

And I remember talking to

13:00

somebody who was on his team

13:03

and what this guy did was

13:03

just randomly, right after

13:06

he took over as CEO, there's

13:06

a breakfast meeting and he

13:09

just wondered idly where

13:09

the blueberry muffins were.

13:11

He just said, Oh, there's

13:11

no blueberry muffins.

13:14

And so in the notes about him

13:14

became likes blueberry muffins.

13:17

And it took him years to figure

13:17

out that every breakfast meeting

13:21

he ever went to, there was huge

13:21

piles of blueberry muffins.

13:24

He didn't even like blueberry muffins that much. And that notion that when

13:26

you're in a position of

13:29

power, that being careful that

13:29

people are watching you so

13:32

closely that you'll say stuff

13:32

you'll just forget or isn't

13:35

very important to you, it'll

13:35

get magnified to something.

13:38

There's so much research

13:38

on resistance to change,

13:40

but I don't think there's

13:40

much research on sort of

13:43

magnification when people

13:43

get overly enthusiastic

13:46

about what they're doing

13:46

and get you into trouble.

13:48

That's just one thing that

13:48

oblivious leaders do is they

13:51

set things off, they have no

13:51

intention of setting off at all.

13:53

All right. The next one would

13:54

be decision amnesia.

13:56

So decision

13:56

amnesia is this tendency where

14:00

in some organizations that

14:00

people make the decision and

14:03

everybody leaves the meeting

14:03

and they think it's done.

14:05

And then it gets raised again

14:05

and two kinds of reasons that we

14:09

see decision amnesia get raised. One is because people

14:11

kind of forget.

14:15

The other one is that there's

14:15

one or two people who don't

14:18

like the decision so they're

14:18

trying to overturn it.

14:21

Sometimes it's the CEO doesn't like the decision where they pretend that

14:23

they're being democratic. And then they make the decision

14:25

and then they come back and they

14:28

say, I didn't really like that. Let's revisit one more time

14:29

where they're insecure,

14:32

they want to reverse it.

14:33

All right. And the last one, cookie

14:33

licking, maybe my favorite.

14:36

This was brought

14:36

to us, we had this research

14:39

assistant for a background

14:39

and her name was Rebecca Hein.

14:41

She started as an undergraduate. She worked through

14:43

Stanford, got a PhD. Now she's running something

14:45

called the Asana Work

14:47

Innovation Lab and she's

14:47

hiring Stanford professors.

14:50

I'm not kidding. So she's gone full circle. So early on in the process, I'm

14:52

talking to Rebecca, like what

14:55

leads to clue of this executive? She said, cookie licking.

14:58

I said, what are you talking about? She said, this actually, it's

14:59

partly Microsoft parlance,

15:02

or it's just like when little

15:02

kids, they lick the cookie

15:05

so nobody else can use it. It's calling dibs on something.

15:08

So other people can't do it. In the classic example

15:10

where we saw was there's

15:13

lots of different startups

15:13

in Silicon Valley.

15:15

And Larry Page was

15:15

definitely guilty of this.

15:18

It Google in the early days,

15:18

this is where the CEO in the

15:22

early days of the company

15:22

insists on interviewing

15:24

every candidate before

15:24

they're giving a job offer.

15:27

Well, that made sense for

15:27

Google when they had 5,000,

15:30

maybe even 300-400 people. But my understanding is Larry

15:32

Page wanted to be involved

15:35

in those decisions well after

15:35

they had 1,000 employees, which

15:38

just doesn't make any sense. It slows down the whole

15:40

situation and then you

15:43

end up losing candidates

15:43

who go somewhere else

15:45

who you want to keep. So cookie licking is just

15:46

calling dibs on thing and just

15:49

becoming the bottleneck in

15:49

the process, even though it

15:51

isn't necessarily something

15:51

you ever intend to do.

15:54

Those are all really great examples.

15:57

Yeah. Well, I hate to say it. I, as a co-author in

15:58

articles, I often am the

16:02

cookie licker because I

16:02

don't, I'm so controlling

16:05

poor Huggy, my co-author. I'm sure I did this to

16:06

him like 3000 times during

16:08

the course of this book. Which is that, no, no,

16:09

no, no, I'll write that.

16:11

Well, it maybe would've

16:11

been better if I didn't

16:14

lick so many cookies during the course of this book. So, I'm guilty.

16:17

In recent years,

16:17

we've heard a lot about

16:19

flattening hierarchies. I actually experienced this.

16:22

I worked for an organization

16:22

where they flattened the

16:24

marketing department down

16:24

to just two levels and

16:27

it created this like mass

16:27

confusion, especially for

16:30

people who thought they

16:30

were in the group that sat

16:32

higher up, but they weren't. It was sort of like, well,

16:33

so is there nothing that

16:37

I can ascend into now? But you talk in the book

16:39

about hierarchy being

16:41

inevitable, not just useful. So take us through that a bit.

16:45

And for our audience that is

16:45

sitting in that startup space

16:47

where they can still design

16:47

their hierarchies, what advice

16:50

would you give them as they

16:50

look to innovate around how

16:53

they structure personnel?

16:54

There are organizations that are more hierarchical and have

16:55

more levels then there are

16:59

fewer levels than others. So I'm not saying

17:00

that more is better. I'm saying some is inevitable.

17:04

And the fact is there's all of

17:04

this research, like researchers

17:07

will try to create leaderless

17:07

groups and tell them they

17:10

all have equal authority. They fight like crazy over

17:11

who's in charge informally.

17:14

It's one of the best ways to

17:14

create conflict and inefficiency

17:17

in just a small group is

17:17

to tell them they have no

17:20

leader and everybody has the

17:20

same amount of authority and

17:22

they ended up fighting over. So the problem with hierarchy

17:23

is you just need it to

17:26

organize human beings. And this is the basic rule.

17:28

People may say bureaucracy

17:28

is a dirty word, but the fact

17:32

is, as much as all of us hate

17:32

bureaucracy, when you have

17:35

people, you have to break

17:35

them into sub-groups after

17:38

a certain amount of size. You have to figure out who has

17:39

final decision authority, and

17:44

you have to have some rules. I'm sorry, there's just no other

17:45

way to run a human organization.

17:48

And so you might as well

17:48

have a logical number

17:51

of hierarchical levels. You might as well have

17:52

reasonable breakdowns and

17:54

understanding who has the final

17:54

decision is really important.

17:58

And one thing we do talk about in the book, and this is something that I was

17:59

co-author of a piece that was

18:02

in Harvard Business Review at the beginning of the year on this, is that what great leaders

18:04

do is rather than saying,

18:08

oh, the hierarchy is fixed. And I'm in charge all the time,

18:09

or I'm delegating everything

18:12

that would be no hierarchy,

18:12

even though even that case,

18:15

the leader is doing the

18:15

delegation that what they do

18:17

is they flex the hierarchy. And my co-author, Lindy

18:19

Greer, did some studies

18:22

with 10 startups. And what she found was that

18:24

the best CEOs of startups

18:27

don't insist on making every

18:27

decision and don't delegate

18:29

all the time, they flex. So what they do is they say,

18:31

okay, so let's brainstorm, let's

18:36

have an argument or a debate

18:36

about the best way to do this.

18:39

Let's get ideas from people. And then they say, timeout,

18:41

here's what we're going to do.

18:46

Here's who's going to do it. And they go. Or one of the most important

18:48

things for hierarchy, and this is something

18:50

that's really important. You can look at even

18:52

international relations and my

18:54

late dissertation advisor, Bob

18:54

Kahn, talked about this a lot,

18:58

is that when there is conflict,

18:58

whether it's in a group or at a

19:00

national level or international

19:00

level, hierarchy, knowing

19:04

who is in charge and who has

19:04

the most power tends to work.

19:08

Because let's say in a group

19:08

dynamics, the boss can jump

19:11

in and say, let's stop arguing

19:11

and let's move forward.

19:15

This isn't useful. And when somebody has more

19:16

authority, when they say that

19:19

it works, but there's no way

19:19

I can figure out to organize

19:22

human beings without having

19:22

some pecking order or apes or

19:25

dogs pick sort of your mammal. So, and I wish it wasn't true.

19:29

I wish we were all equal and

19:29

there are more benevolent

19:32

versus more nasty hierarchies. And I want them to be more

19:34

human and so forth, but I

19:36

don't know how to organize a

19:36

human organization without it.

19:39

So, you know, as organizations grow, we end up spending a lot of time

19:41

talking about collaboration.

19:43

There's one part in the book I really like where you talk about systems of

19:45

interdependence and you have,

19:49

so for the listener, you have

19:49

reciprocal interdependence

19:51

or a system where people,

19:51

teams, silos, whatever it may

19:54

be, they have to constantly

19:54

adjust back and forth to one

19:57

another as the work unfolds. It's like a soccer team.

20:00

Then there's the pooled

20:00

interdependence, and that's

20:03

when organizations roll up the

20:03

separate independent efforts

20:06

of people or whole teams. So the example there that

20:08

Bob gives is the gymnastics

20:12

team in the Olympic. So you point out that the

20:13

second actually requires a lot

20:17

less because, but it sounds

20:17

counterintuitive for people

20:21

working in corporate spaces

20:21

where we've been talking

20:23

about breaking down silos

20:23

and using collaboration to

20:26

fuel innovation for decades. Kind of talk to me about

20:28

the benefit of these systems

20:31

and when to rely on each.

20:33

Well, first of all, this is a general design, and I'm not saying that you

20:35

should do everything you can

20:38

to reduce interdependence. When people need to

20:39

share information, it's important that they do it.

20:42

It may be empowering and so

20:42

forth, but the fact is that in

20:45

fact, even one of my co-authors

20:45

defined interdependence.

20:49

Interdependence means that things don't come out the way you want them to, it's

20:51

almost by like what my wife

20:54

and I are having a discussion

20:54

today about whether to go out

20:57

for dinner, whether to order

20:57

food in or to cook dinner.

21:01

I have a clear preference, but I'm not winning. And that's that's sort

21:03

of like how life is.

21:05

And so the more interdependence you have in some ways, it's all these people you

21:07

have to check with and there are issues with it.

21:11

And I'll tell you a little story. This may be referred in

21:13

the book, but I saw her at a Halloween party,

21:14

so it's more updated.

21:17

So I have a friend, Kim

21:17

Scott, she's famous for

21:20

writing a book called Radical

21:20

Candor and Kim had a long

21:23

career in corporate America. And she just describes going

21:24

from Google and she said,

21:27

Google, I would get 500 emails a

21:27

day from different groups about

21:32

different things and so forth. And then she moves to Apple.

21:36

Apple is famous for its

21:36

secrecy, scared, silent is

21:39

sometimes what they say. It's amazing how

21:40

secretive Apple is.

21:43

And my friends who would Apple say, you can only have lunch with your group

21:45

because you're not allowed to talk to anybody else.

21:48

That's how secretive they are. So Kim gets there and she

21:49

said, I would get five

21:52

emails a day if I was lucky. It usually would be

21:54

three cause I, they'd only come from my team.

21:57

I couldn't talk to anybody else. And she said, it was amazing

21:58

how much work I got done

22:01

because I didn't have to be

22:01

involved in everything else.

22:04

And the way that she put

22:04

it is that at Google, the

22:06

concept of staying in your

22:06

lane is something that nobody

22:09

really understood at all. And at Apple, that's the way

22:11

the whole company was ran.

22:13

It just a small aside where I

22:13

first really heard about this.

22:17

I had this guy in class. He took a year off to do

22:19

some classes at Stanford.

22:21

His name's Chris Espinoza. Chris Espinoza is employee

22:23

number eight at Apple.

22:26

He's still there. And the reason he's employee

22:28

number eight is that he was

22:31

going to high school when he

22:31

was working with the two Steve's

22:34

and he got back to work at

22:34

three thirty after high school

22:37

and they'd given away the

22:37

first seven employee numbers.

22:39

So he's employee number

22:39

eight and he says, I'm the

22:42

original Apple employee, the

22:42

only original one left, and

22:45

I can only get into 5% of the

22:45

spaces with my badge because

22:48

there's so much secrecy. It's not like I'm a huge

22:49

Apple fan, but if we look

22:52

at Apple, they're secretive. They're really specialized.

22:56

They don't really share

22:56

information and it's only a few

22:59

very senior executives who know

22:59

everything that's going on.

23:02

I once had a guy who was a

23:02

very senior executive say

23:05

to me, it may be that Tim

23:05

Cook and Johnny Ive may be

23:09

the only two people in the

23:09

company who know everything

23:11

that's in the next iPhone. I mean, and Apple's

23:12

doing okay, you know.

23:16

And it's not a particularly

23:16

inhuman organization either.

23:18

It's like notion that there's different ways to organize companies.

23:22

And I'm not saying everybody should be like Apple. I wouldn't want to work

23:24

in such a secretive kind

23:26

of paranoia type place. But there's different

23:28

solutions that actually work.

23:30

And in that case, reduce friction.

23:32

Before we go, there's two things we always like to do here.

23:35

The first is I want to give you

23:35

a chance to tell people more

23:37

about, where they can connect

23:37

with you and where they can

23:40

pick up a copy of the book.

23:41

Well, it's easy to buy the book, The Friction Project.

23:44

The best place probably to

23:44

connect with me is either

23:46

on LinkedIn or my website

23:46

is bobsutton.net, but I'm

23:49

very active on LinkedIn. Honestly, I don't know

23:51

the future of Twitter/X.

23:53

I guess I have 60 something

23:53

thousand followers on Twitter/X.

23:57

I think at least two thirds

23:57

of them are bots from other

24:00

countries or something,

24:00

but I am also active on

24:02

Twitter and learning threads. But the best place to find

24:04

me now is probably LinkedIn

24:06

and I'm pretty active.

24:07

All right. The second thing is we

24:08

started a little tradition

24:10

here on the podcast where

24:10

you get to ask me a question.

24:12

So I want to turn it over to you and be what you want to ask. Anything you want.

24:16

Here's the question I want to ask you. You spent a few years

24:18

in corporate America.

24:20

If you could go back and

24:20

give one piece of advice

24:23

to your 25 year old

24:23

self, what would you do?

24:26

Don't speak

24:26

unless you have something

24:29

to add, especially in

24:29

the first five years.

24:32

Just be the fly on the wall, you

24:32

know, learn, learn, just wait.

24:36

Because what happened is we

24:36

talked a little bit about,

24:39

people talking and they say

24:39

a lot of things, but they

24:42

don't actually say anything. You're, you feel like

24:44

you're forced or you have

24:46

to speak in a meeting. Well, that's becomes one of the

24:47

habits you pick up is you start

24:50

saying things and you're like,

24:50

that didn't even mean anything.

24:53

I don't even know what I meant. I would go back and tell

24:54

him to turn that off and

24:57

just be comfortable being

24:57

quiet and leave in the room.

25:00

You know, who, um,

25:00

Dan Lyon, he was sort of like

25:04

the fake Steve jobs for years.

25:06

He was one of the writers on Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books.

25:09

So his last book is STFU.

25:12

That's the name of it. And he basically says I talk

25:13

like crazy and I really needed

25:16

to STFU and to editorialize,

25:16

I hardly ever mentioned his

25:19

name, but I think Elon Musk

25:19

would benefit if he filed that

25:22

a little bit more close, he'd

25:22

benefit himself and others.

25:25

And possibly the Tesla stock

25:25

price forget Twitter/X or

25:27

whatever it's called now.

25:29

All right. Well, that is all we

25:29

have time for today, Bob.

25:31

I want to thank you for joining us.

25:33

Thank goodness. We have time to be quiet.

25:36

Thank you so much. Nice to talk to you, David.

25:38

Absolutely. And listeners, if you want to

25:38

keep up with all things people,

25:41

operations, and HR, and you're

25:41

not already subscribed to our

25:44

newsletter, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe and get signed up.

25:50

Until next time, book a spa

25:50

day, drink some hot cocoa.

25:53

Be well.