Innovation 2.0: Shortcuts and Speed Bumps

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Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. When you're trying to invent a new product, or

write a screenplay, or come up with a new way to do something at work, it's fun to focus on the

possibilities. It's enjoyable to have brainstorming sessions, throw ideas up on a whiteboard,

daydream. Very often, however, these brainstorming sessions don't lead to anything tangible.

Teams fill up walls with sticky notes about creative possibilities and suggestions for

improvement, but none of them are actually implemented. If you've been part of an organization

that does this, you might get the sneaking suspicion that you are not engaged in innovation, but

in what some researchers call innovation theater. This is not to say that ideas are unimportant,

but it is to underscore that when it comes to building something new, what really matters is

execution. For the last few weeks, we've been exploring the science of innovation. We've

examined how successful entrepreneurs are great at something called effectuation. We've

looked at our attitudes about the role of genius in success, and how cultures of genius can

undermine our growth. If you missed those episodes, I strongly recommend you listen to them in

this podcast feed. Today, in the latest installment of our Innovation 2.0 series, we explore the

science of execution. How to move from innovation theater to actual innovation, this week on

Hidden Brain. We all have them. Small frustrations that make our lives just a little bit more

difficult. Like standing in a long line at the grocery store, or getting too many emails. Not being

able to reach a customer service rep when you have a problem. At Stanford University,

psychologist Bob Sutton studies these frustrations. The annoying bureaucracies we encounter

when dealing with companies, institutions and organizations. Bob Sutton, welcome to Hidden

Brain.

Bob Sutton:

Oh, Shankar, it's great to be here. I'm happy to talk to you.

Shankar Vedantam:

I want to start with a personal story that I think many of our listeners can relate to, Bob. It

involves a conflict that you had with your cable provider. Tell me the story of what happened.

Bob Sutton:

Well, I mean, there's a sad part. So my mother passed away, but then her partner was still living

in the house, and there was all these problems that we could not have cable TV for him. And I

kept calling them. They claimed they'd fix it. I would go through these phone trees over and over

and over again. It was just driving me absolutely, and all the stress and grief of my mother's

death that I was dealing with. This was a part of it. And after probably 10 different phone calls

and phone trees and people making mistakes, I went and I complained, and I did it on Twitter,

now X. And this person who is a board member found out about it, and he said, I will help you.

And then magically, I got the VIP privilege line, one phone call, fixed immediately, all fees

waived. And in fact, later on, about three weeks later, my son just wanted an upgrade up in San

Francisco, and I called them. They came to his apartment for no charge. They didn't charge

them for the new equipment. It was like we were moved from the regular person's experience to

the VIP lounge, and we had the privilege to be protected from the inconveniences that the little

people suffered from.

Shankar Vedantam:

Bob had always been interested in how organizations run. So instead of simply reveling in his

newfound VIP status, he looked into why the cable company was giving some customers the

VIP treatment. He discovered that the goal of this ultra-secret club was not about pleasing

customers. It was meant to serve the boss class. When well-connected people called in favors

or irate customers created trouble, having a VIP lounge to send them to bought executives

peace and quiet.

Bob Sutton:

And I sort of compare that to, well, he's one of, this guy named Carl Liebert, he's been head of

many companies. At one point, he was head of supply chain of Home Depot, and there were all

these problems at Home Depot. And he not only would go shopping anonymously, he would

actually work the midnight shift with the workers loading and loading boxes to try to figure out

where the supply chain problems actually happened. And to me, there's a big difference

between being in the VIP lounge and sort of being protected from the inconveniences, if you

will.

Shankar Vedantam:

Bob argues that one reason companies and organizations drop the ball when it comes to

execution is that the leaders of companies are too far removed from the experiences of

customers. Well, that is far from the only reason. Some organizations are so complex that

getting different silos to talk to one another is next to impossible. He cites the work of Stanford

researcher, Melissa Valentine, who studied a cancer center.

Bob Sutton:

And what her research found was that patients suffered from what she called the cancer tax,

which means that when you have a relative who gets cancer, it's so hard to glue together all the

different parts of the treatment that it falls to the patient. And so the cancer center she studied

had excellent doctors, individual departments, but you need all these different services. When

you have somebody who has cancer, and one of my neighbors, her brother is a doctor, and

their mother got cancer, and the doctor said, the fact that I'm a physician actually didn't help me

that much navigating through the system because there's so much fragmentation and lack of

communication between silos and occupations and so forth. So sometimes it's structural too,

and it's very difficult to overcome for anyone.

Shankar Vedantam:

One organization Bob studied revealed a problem that he calls executive magnification.

Bob Sutton:

A lot of times senior executives complain there's resistance to change. When I come up with an

idea, people push back against it. But all of us who are in hierarchies, whether we're baboons or

humans, we tend to focus very heavily on the moves and actions and preferences of those in

power. And it's just adaptive because those in power, they can give us rewards and

punishments of all kinds. And this was a new CEO. And one of the first meetings he went to,

and this is CEO of a Fortune 10 company, a very large company, and he gets to an early

meeting and he just comments, where's the blueberry muffins? And it was just an off-hand

comment. And then somebody put in his notes, you know, prefers blueberry muffins, and he

couldn't figure out for years why every meeting he went to, there were huge piles of blueberry

muffins. And imagine all these poor underlings just being really nervous because otherwise

they'd have an unhappy CEO.

Shankar Vedantam:

Thank you for watching. Now, did the CEO actually want blueberry muffins at all these

meetings?

Bob Sutton:

No, maybe at that moment, but that wasn't particularly important to him. But it's a reminder for

people who are in power that there's all sorts of psychological research about attention turns up

the hierarchy, and so you've got to be careful. And even when you're sort of thinking out loud to

say, I'm thinking out loud, I'm not asking you to do anything. And in a more sort of serious

example, some 30 years ago, I did research with the 7-Eleven company. So the then CEO, he

walks into a 7-Eleven store, and a clerk is rude to him. He comes back to the office, and he kind

of has a temper tantrum about how unacceptable it is. And some of his underlings say, oh my

goodness, we've got to do something about the courtesy in 7-Eleven stores. And they started all

of these different contests, some of which I was involved in evaluating. And the idea was to

provide incentives for every clerk in every 7-Eleven store to smile, establish eye contact, and to

say thank you to every customer. And they did all this analysis. And in the end, and this is

included in some of the research I was involved in, we were able to show there was virtually no

relationship between the courtesy in a 7-Eleven store and their sales. People want to get in and

out quickly, and they don't want a rude clerk. That's all they want. And after spending millions of

dollars, including they had a thanks a million contest, that the owner of one 7-Eleven store or

manager, if they had perfect courtesy, they entered a drawing, and somebody won a million

dollars for the courtesy in their store. And this was just largely the effect of executive

magnification. The CEO hadn't realized that this sort of crazy thing happened.

Shankar Vedantam:

As you can see, what customers and clients perceive as a badly run organization can be the

result of many different internal forces. Sometimes, managers want to ignore unpleasant

feedback. At other times, companies become hyper-focused on one issue, like smiling at

customers, or making blueberry muffins available at every meeting when those things don't

really matter. A few years ago, Bob wrote an entire book about another reason groups fail to

execute on good ideas. The book's title has, shall we say, salty language.

Bob Sutton:

For better or worse, in 2007, I published a book called The No A**hole Rule, which I thought

was going to be my worst-selling book, and it's turned out to be my best-selling book. And the

argument that that book makes, that when people leave others feeling demeaned, deenergized, disrespected, that it's actually bad for business. When people feel that way, they

perform less well. Their health is negatively affected. One of the key things is that they're not

willing to go the extra mile. And there's large-scale studies, for example, in fast food chains, that

when you've got a nasty manager of a fast food chain, that people are more likely to steal, more

likely to quit. So if you have leaders throughout an organization who treat people with

disrespect, that that ends up being a problem. We can talk about whether people who are jerks

get ahead in some systems, that actually might be possible in some systems. But when you

work for somebody who leaves you feeling that way, I think that the evidence is quite clear that

it undermines the performance of the organization or team.

Shankar Vedantam:

And there's also been evidence that suggests that even when you have one person on a team,

even if the team is quite large, but you have one person on the team who really is a negative

personality or a difficult person to work with or just an unpleasant person, that can damage the

relationships and the camaraderie of the whole team.

Bob Sutton:

Yeah, so the evidence, and there's two reasons, at least one is, there's a lot of evidence that

negative emotions are more contagious than positive emotions in general. And then the other

thing, which some studies show, and I think if you look at more anecdotal evidence, you'll see, if

you talk to a boss and say, who do you spend most of your time with? Very often they'll say, I

spend 90% of my time dealing with the 10% who are most difficult. And so that's the sort of

uniform sort of issue that happens throughout organizations. So yeah, and it's funny because at

one point, I thought maybe it might be good to have maybe one low status jerk in a team or

organization to show how not to behave, but I've since come to the belief that they're so difficult

that it's better to get rid of them, although it's pretty difficult, as I bet all your listeners can tell

you.

Shankar Vedantam:

Yeah, I've been on many search committees for many positions, and I think increasingly many

people say, even when you have someone who's incredibly talented and smart, if this person is

a truly unpleasant person, it's probably not worth it to bring them on the team.

Bob Sutton:

Yeah, so one of the tests that I like to use, and if you look at a place like Microsoft, I believe

they've had a transformation around this, is I ask them, if you are a superstar and a jerk, do you

get ahead? And there are some organizations, if you are a superstar and a jerk, under the old

Microsoft, it was actually rewarded to try to push down fellow coworkers, and now the kind of

people who get ahead at Microsoft, and they're quite explicit like this, are the people who do

good work and who help others along rather than stomp on them on the way to the top. And a

little bit of competition, even a lot of competition in the culture can be very useful, but the

question is how you treat your coworkers can have a big effect.

Shankar Vedantam:

As Bob looked at these many disparate examples, he started to see that there was one

common theme that connected all of them. It was the idea of friction. It might be helpful to

explain this with an analogy. Let's say you're an engineer designing a car. You want it to run as

smoothly as possible. But this doesn't mean that you want to reduce friction in everything the

car does. When a driver hits the brakes, friction is what makes the car stop. If a motorist yanks

at the steering wheel and it spins around without any resistance, the car could twist out of

control. At the same time, if there's too much friction in the wheels, the car won't move. As an

engineer, in other words, friction is essential to everything you design. But there are times you

want to increase friction, and times you need to decrease friction. The more Bob thought about

it, the more he realized that friction works the same way in organizations. The reason many

people and companies fall down when it comes to executing on their dreams is that they have

too much friction in places that need to run smoothly and too little friction in places that need to

move slowly. When we come back, the science of friction and how you can use it to design your

own life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm

Shankar Vedantam. All of us encounter inconveniences as we deal with cable companies,

schools, and governments. At Stanford University, psychologist Bob Sutton studies the

organizational origins of these frustrations. Along with Huggy Rao, Bob is co-author of The

Friction Project, how smart leaders make the right things easier and the wrong things harder.

Bob and Huggy argue that every organization, from corner convenience stores to international

aid agencies, can be plagued by destructive friction. Bob, I want to talk about a source of friction

that we see in public policy all the time. You talk about a system in Michigan where residents

were applying for government assistance, but found it very difficult to do so. Tell me what was

happening, Bob.

Bob Sutton:

So there's a class that I've been teaching for years with some colleagues that's called Design

Leadership, and what we do is we take a pair of students and we link them to a company or a

nonprofit and help them solve a little problem. So usually these are young students, but every

now and then we get somebody visit Stanford. So this guy, his name's Michael Brennan. He

was on leave from being the CEO of the United Way of Southeastern Michigan. First

conversation I have, he pulls out this really long form and lays it out on the floor. It's 42 pages

long. It has a thousand questions.

Shankar Vedantam:

Wow.

Bob Sutton:

And he says this form is a form that is completed by more than 2 million Michigan residents a

year, people who need help with food, with medical care, with financial assistance. And it's a

terrible form. And just to give you an example of how silly the form was, my favorite or least

favorite question was, when was your child conceived?

Shankar Vedantam:

Conceived, not born.

Bob Sutton:

Conceived, not born, conceived, not born. And he starts a non-profit called Sevilla in

southeastern Michigan. And one of their first projects was to work on trying to fix this form. And

they actually made a huge amount of change in this. And it's much easier for Michigan residents

now to complete that form.

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, I have to confess that every year when tax day rolls around, I feel exactly the same

thing about the tax code, which is that I think of myself as a reasonably smart person, but I find

it genuinely incomprehensible, and almost deliberately so.

Bob Sutton:

Oh, yes. Well, and very often, I think that happens that no individual who assembles those

forms wants to do it to us, but every person wants to add their sort of little thing that makes them

happy. So that's one of the problems there.

Shankar Vedantam:

So I'm imagining when it comes to something like the tax code, over time, someone somewhere

has found that there's someone who cheats some aspect of the tax code. And so you say, let's

add this other little wrinkle over here that prevents people from doing this. And if you do this

sufficiently often over a hundred years, you're going to end up with something incredibly

complex and difficult to understand.

Bob Sutton:

Yes. And one of the other problems is that in most systems, the people who want to take things

away, there tends to be sort of one advocate for it. And one of the things that we focus on in

organizational life is that people who lead more large and complex systems and make life

difficult for all of us, those are the people who tend to get rewarded, not the people who take

things away. Just as an example, in my own university, and I suspect many other organizations

in the world, a good way, if you're a manager, to get a raise is to build a larger and larger

organization, because the more people report to you, the more you deserve to get paid, at least

according to human resources. And if your team gets cut in half, sometimes you get a pay cut

too. So a lot of times, there's just incentives to add complexity too.

Shankar Vedantam:

You cite the example of someone who uses a wonderful phrase that I had never heard before,

jargon monoxide. Tell me about that, Bob.

Bob Sutton:

Well, so I first heard this. There's a woman named Polly LeBeur, who been around, she was a

management writer for years, and she visited my classes maybe 20 years ago, and she used

the term jargon monoxide, and I've been sort of enamored with it ever since. And to us, it's

hollow and confusing language, and we dissect three or four different kinds of jargon monoxide.

We talk about just bulls**t, just this language that means absolutely nothing. The other two kinds

to me are more interesting. A second kind is which we call convoluted crap. This is stuff that

could be simple, but it's so complicated it's impossible to understand it. And then perhaps my

favorite one is jargon mishmash syndrome. So this is where you have so many different sort of

languages and terms that people can't understand what is going on. And there's some situations

where a word or a term means so many things to so many different people, they don't know

what it is. That's Denny Kahneman's definition of noise, is it's a random scatter of ideas.

Shankar Vedantam:

It's not always too much friction that's the problem within organizations. Sometimes the cause of

our frustrations is actually a lack of friction within organizations. One example that Bob cites is

the creation of Google's smart glasses technology, known as Google Glass.

Bob Sutton:

Well, so Google Glass, this is one of the famous stories in Google's history. It also might be

God's way of telling you you have too much money when you do stuff like this, by the way. So,

what happened was, so there was a team that developed essentially a set of eyeglasses that

had a camera and a computer involved in it. And it was a really cool sort of prototype. And

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, he saw the technology, and he got so excited that he sort of

ripped it out of the developer's hands and gave the technology to some of the most famous

people in the world. And then very quickly, all the technology reviews and all the people tried to

use it. It had battery life problems. It actually had a whole bunch of reliability problems. Oh, it

had privacy problems. That was another issue. And so they ended up sort of pulling it from the

market. And the technology reviews, one in particular, was this is one of the worst technology

products ever made. And to us, the reason that's a lesson, and especially this idea of people

who are in power sometimes don't face enough friction. His team did try to tell him that they

didn't think it was a very good idea, but they kind of couldn't stop him because he had the power

to rip it out of their hands and to put it into the marketplace. And there's also a sort of a

postscript to that that many of the people were involved in that project were very skilled

technologists just sort of quit in frustration. That is sort of a classic story of something that was

done a little bit too quickly.

Shankar Vedantam:

We've talked a little bit about the challenge of silos. You gave me the example of the hospital

where you build a wonderful oncology department, but the oncology department doesn't talk to

the hematology department, which doesn't talk to the internal medicine department. And if

you're a patient, you in fact might have to interact with more than one department at the

hospital, and it creates this very difficult navigational problem for patients. But you also make

the very interesting point that sometimes organizations also need to have teams function a little

independently, because if you don't, if you bring everyone together too soon, you can end up

with an echo chamber.

Bob Sutton:

When people communicate and reach consensus too early and too often, you end up where,

what is it? Everybody thinks the same, so nobody thinks very much. And when you have

independent, even competing units coming up with a solution to the problem, sometimes you

come up with better solutions. And in the early days, at Hewlett Packard, this is in the late 70s,

early 80s, when they were in the printer business, one reason they dominated so well in the

printer business is they had such decentralized businesses that there were actually three or four

different Hewlett Packard divisions that had their own printer in the marketplace. And although

you can say, well, this was a very expensive market test, it was really dumb. But on the other

hand, you did not have the problem of people having to have consensus. You had a real test

and the best product sort of won in the marketplace. So to me, that is an example. Yes, there

can be some inefficiency in this case, but you certainly don't have the group thing problem.

Shankar Vedantam:

I was thinking about a study that I remember reading many years ago. I think this might have

been Sam Summers at Tufts University, and he was interested in the criminal justice system.

And he was looking at juries that had diverse pools of jurors versus juries that did not have

diverse pools of jurors. And what he found very interestingly was that the more diverse the jury

pool was, the more it prompted multiple people on the jury to challenge one another and to

disagree with one another. And that disagreement obviously produced friction. It was

uncomfortable. It would have been easier if everyone agreed on everything from the first

moment. But of course, as you can imagine, the decisions were actually much better as a result

of that friction. Another example of where friction could come in useful.

Bob Sutton:

I agree with that in having studied various elements of creativity for years. If you look at teams

that are the most creative teams, they're teams that fight in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

They know when to start fighting and they know when to stop fighting. A good example of this is

Ed Catmull, who was president of Pixar. He would set up something that was called the Brain

Trust, where all of the different people who made movies would review the dailies or the ideas

for each other's films. And they'd engage in an argument in an atmosphere of mutual respect

and was understood that it was your job to be critical, but not to be cruel. So yes, to me, that's

the hallmark of Creative Teams.

Shankar Vedantam:

You also talk about how sometimes the longer we go through an experience, the more

meaningful the experience becomes to us, which is a very interesting psychological idea where

the more friction we have, the more engaged we might feel. So talk about that idea, Bob.

Bob Sutton:

Well, this is, you know so much about psychology, it's ridiculous.

Bob Sutton:

This is a very old finding, this goes back to the 50s, the notion that labor leads to love. It's just

that idea that when you put more of your heart and soul into something, it becomes more

valuable to you independently of its actual value.

Shankar Vedantam:

You give a couple of examples in the book of people and organizations that slow down and it

really benefited them. One of the examples you talk about is the company Waze, which actually

got a whole bunch of funding and could have grown very quickly. But tell me what was

happening with Waze at the time for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with it. First, tell us

what Waze is.

Bob Sutton:

So Waze is a navigation software that it's more social than other navigation software. And

essentially you put in the address that you want to go to and it tells you where you're going to

go. So what happened in the early days of Waze, this is about 2012 or so, Noam Bardin, who is

the CEO, was actually an Israeli based company, but their primary market was in the United

States. And so they got about $30 million in Series B financing. And the venture capitalists who

gave them the money wanted them to do two things, which are about going fast. One was to

hire people, and the other thing was to do more product development. But the thing that Noam

and his team figured out was that when people downloaded the software, a month later, none of

them were using it. So there was a problem. So what he did was he stopped the whole

company, use sort of an automotive analogy, hit the brakes, and did both quantitative and

qualitative analysis about why people aren't keeping our software, and did no hiring and no

product development. And he made a list. He called it the MIT list, the most important thing list.

And once they had that list, if you will, they hit the gas. They started hiring people and doing

product development. Once they figured out what needed to be done, and this is very much out

of Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman stuff on fast and slow, that when you're in a cognitive mind

field, you don't rush ahead. Sometimes it's better just to stand there and figure out what's going

on instead of rushing ahead.

Shankar Vedantam:

In public policy, Bob, it feels like there are often times when you want to do something as a

leader. If you're a president or you're a member of Congress or a senator, you want to jump

ahead and you want to pass laws, implement policies. But sometimes, if you try and do that too

quickly, you can find things backfiring on you, because in fact, people are not ready for the new

law, they haven't been prepared for it, you haven't laid the groundwork for it. Can you talk a little

bit about this, that in some ways, you might actually want to introduce friction as you're trying to

solve important problems of public policy, so that you can bring people along with you and not

just impose ideas top-down?

Bob Sutton:

Yeah, so I love that example. I think the example that for me resonates best there is the effort

that was made by the state of Michigan to reduce a benefit form that was completed by 2.5

million people a year, and they cut it by 80% and made it much simpler. But what they did in the

process was they didn't just sort of rush in and say, the current benefits form, which is 1,000

questions long and 42 pages long and has all these silly questions, it's just dumb and we're

gonna fix it. First, what they did was they got the civil servants on board, the head of the

agency. They brought them into a room and had them fill out the 42-page form. He got to page

eight and couldn't go any further. This is a form required of millions of Michiganders. And then

the other thing they did, which I thought was very important, was that they did develop a

prototype, but then they spent about six months working with civil servants and lawyers, and

they went through 1,700 pages of rules and regulations to come up with a form that was 80%

shorter, but still complied with the rules. And now people are filling it out much faster. There's

fewer mistakes. There's fewer visits to the office because people are confused. But to your

point, there was the moments when they had to slow down and bring aboard the civil servants

and government leaders, and they had to slow down to make sure that their new, simple, lowfriction form fit the actual rules and regulations, because otherwise they get mired in litigation, of

course.

Shankar Vedantam:

Can you talk a moment about the idea of friction when it comes to bringing about change, both

within organizations as well as within societies? When you think about many social movements

that have brought about successful change, many of them have done so by actually introducing

friction into the system. So if you think about the civil rights movement, for example, you might

have marches and protests that basically make it hard for organizations or societies to function

smoothly. And in some ways, introducing friction, throwing sand into the gears, is designed to

say there's something wrong with the way the gears are turning. Let's slow down and figure out

what needs to be fixed.

Bob Sutton:

Well, I mean, that's interesting. I'm not a social movement theorist, but my co-author Huggy Rau

is. And he would argue that a lot of times when there's change in an organization or when

there's change in a society, although this often can have negative side effects, that's sort of

forcing people to slow down and to think and to make things more difficult for them enables

them to actually think. And a little bit of inconvenience for people, a little bit of struggle,

sometimes forces them to be more mindful about the challenges that they face and are imposed

on others.

Shankar Vedantam:

Thank you As we've seen, friction can hurt and friction can help. As with all aspects of human

behavior, the correct question to ask is not whether friction is a good thing or a bad thing, but to

ask when friction is good and how much is useful. That's when we come back. You're listening

to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Bob

Sutton is an organizational psychologist at Stanford University. He studies friction, the

resistance that we encounter in our daily lives, and the organizational hoops we must jump

through when we pay a utility bill or get a driver's license. Friction is the inbox full of emails we

comb through every morning, and the meetings on our calendar that go nowhere, or being put

on endless hold as we try to reach someone in customer service. When his mother passed

away some years ago, Bob found himself mired in friction. Besides dealing with his grief, he

discovered he had to deal with bureaucracy. For example, he needed to update her car

registration. So one morning, he headed to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Knowing that the

DMV had a reputation as a bureaucratic hellhole, he dreaded the visit.

Bob Sutton:

I got there at 7.30 in the morning without an appointment, and I had blocked off the entire day.

And I was maybe 50th in line. A fellow walks up and down the line, asks each one of us why

we're there. There were some people who didn't need to be there. For example, one fellow was

there for a passport. They don't provide passports, so he said he should leave. He gave us

forms, and then he sent me to the window where I was supposed to go, so he was doing triage,

and I was out of there by 8.15, and I was completely confused about how quickly and easily it

happened. And he was somebody, we'd call him somebody who was a trustee of others' time, a

friction fixer, who I initially thought he just took it upon himself to do it. So we have since found

out that there is a large-scale effort to improve both the speed and emotional experience of

going through the DMV.

Shankar Vedantam:

You used a very interesting word a second ago, and the word was triage, because of course,

when this person came out 15 minutes before the doors opened, and basically said, let me send

people to different places. This person actually is waiting for a passport, that's not the right, you

can't get it at the DMV, this person needs to go counter number six, this person needs to fill out

a form. There's just a whole bunch of information and time that this person ended up saving by

stepping out for 15 minutes, because of course, the person knows everything that you can get

at the DMV, the one person that knows everything. Can you talk about this idea? It's such a

profound idea, because I think many organizations don't have a person like that. When you go

to a hospital, there's often no one actually playing triage that basically says, here's how you

navigate our organization, because that's what this person was doing.

Bob Sutton:

That's exactly what that person was doing. And that's one of our solutions. We talk about how

friction fixers, yes, in an ideal world, they'll fix things on the team or the organization, but one of

the hallmarks of people who are great at understanding what is available and what aren't,

they're sort of tour guides through the system. And we talk in the book about grease people and

gunk people, and I'll name a name, in my department, Management, Science and Engineering,

there's a woman named Lori Cottle, who's our head of student services. She's been there

almost as long as I have, maybe she's been there only 27 years. And Lori sees it as her job to

make every student's journey throughout Stanford as easy and satisfying as possible. And she'll

tell you who to talk to, who not to talk to. She'll tell you which rules are completely inflexible and

which ones you can get around and how to get around them. And to me, somebody like her is

an absolutely beautiful part of a system. And maybe she's changed a few rules, but mostly she

knows how the system works, and she sees it as her job to help you have the best journey you

can through the system as a Stanford student. She advises undergraduates, masters and PhD

students in our department, and they all have a different set of rules, and she all helps them get

through a fairly complicated system as easily as possible.

Shankar Vedantam:

And this must be true not just at universities, but at organizations across the board. As

organizations get bigger, they get more complex. There are more ways in which things fit

together or don't fit together. There are organizational and institutional histories that people

might not know if they're encountering the organization for the first time. Having someone play

this role, and you use the word tour guide, I might use the word translator, because I think that's

the other role that this person is playing, to say, here's how this section of the organization talks

to this other section of the organization. So invaluable.

Bob Sutton:

Yes, and to me, very often people like that, and I think of organizations with silos and

occupations, very often they're people who are generalists in a sea of specialists, that they

know enough about how each part works to sort of glue the system together and to serve as

tour guides for all of us.

Shankar Vedantam:

You talk about a very interesting idea called the rule of halves. What is the rule of halves, Bob?

Bob Sutton:

So the rule of halves, this is an idea that actually Lydie Klotz, he and I came up with the notion

that as sort of a thought experiment, if you went through the number of meetings you have, the

length of the emails, the number of emails you sent, what would happen if you cut it by 50%?

And then the example we use in the book, it comes to us from a guy named Rob Cross. He was

working with an executive, a guy named Scott, who had about 5,000 employees reporting to

him. And he also had 16 direct reports. And he also had this philosophy that he should be

involved in all decisions. And one of the things that Rob Cross did with him as sort of a

consulting job is he said, we're gonna cut everything by 50%. The number of direct reports you

have, the number of emails you send, the number of meetings you go to. And it turned out that

this guy saved his job and saved his marriage, as Rob tells it, because he actually did apply the

rule of halves. So we're not saying to all of your listeners, you should cut everything by 50%, but

it's a good sort of thought experiment to start with. And it was kind of fun, because Lydie Klotz

and I, I don't know if it's his idea or my idea, but we give each other credit.

Shankar Vedantam:

But in some ways, I think what you're saying is that if an organization has a set of policies or

rules, and you cut the policies in half, or cut the rules in half, it doesn't mean that that has to be

your final answer. You might still decide you actually need to add back many rules that you've

cut, but just the thought experiment, the effect of basically saying, let me cut it in half and see

what actually is essential, jolts our minds, I think, into awareness of how complex our systems

have become.

Bob Sutton:

Yeah, yes. Another also related example, which we talk about in the book, and was based on a

little piece that I wrote with Rebecca Hines, who was, Rebecca Hines is a wonderful person.

She was involved as our research assistant from the very beginning as an undergraduate, and

now she runs something called the Asana Work Innovation Lab. She's actually hiring professors

instead of working for them. And so we did this little piece on, we call it a team reset, and it was

with 60 Asana employees. And what she did with 30 of those 60s is that she had them remove

all standing meetings from their calendars for 48 hours. And then after evaluating, if you will, the

amount of effort and the value of each one, add them back in. That to me, that's a complete

cleanse and that's this idea of once you take something away, it forces you to think about

whether you actually want to put it back in. So, and by the way, that team reset experience

saved the average employee about four hours a week.

Shankar Vedantam:

You tell a remarkable story about Winston Churchill during the very difficult days of World War

II, focused not on the Nazi war machine, but on bureaucrats in Britain. Tell me that story, Bob.

Bob Sutton:

This is August 1940. The Blitzkrieg started a month later, and what he did is he sent out a 234

word memo called the Brevity Memo, and he said, please stop writing such long convoluted

detailed memos. It's slowing down the whole system. He said it much more elegantly than that.

And then he also added this notion that the length and number of memos that are written by an

ambassador is not an indication of the quality of your work. And by the way, and this is

consistent with our notion that friction fixing is sort of like mowing the lawn. There is no one and

done. When he came back, because those of us who know the history, he was prime minister

during World War II, but then he got voted out, and then he came back some years later. When

he came back in the 50s, he wrote more brevity memos and said it was even worse than before.

So it is one of those things that you've got to have the discipline to keep fighting over and over

again. There's no one and done with this sort of stuff.

Shankar Vedantam:

Because of course, things will keep growing back because of the addition sickness that we all

suffer from.

Bob Sutton:

Yes, yes, we are just humans.

Shankar Vedantam:

A crucial lesson that runs through many of these ideas is the lesson of empathy. Organizations,

companies and governments often run poorly because the people making the decisions are

divorced from the experience of the people who work in the organization and the people who

need the services of the organization. One of Bob's superheroes when it comes to fixing

problems with friction is an executive at General Motors named Mary Barra.

Bob Sutton:

Every person I've ever worked with just loves her. And the number of different jobs she's had at

General Motors are amazing. She ran a large plant. She was head of manufacturing. She was

head of supply chain. She was head of HR before they brought her in. So rather than being

somebody who just is sort of focused on one element of running this large complex

organization, she understands how it runs. And then the other thing she does, since we

interviewed a number of people who worked with her, is she's the classic person who makes

very strong decisions, but she always waits to hear everybody's opinion, and then she says,

we're gonna do this. And I think that's a hallmark of a good leader who glues together different

elements of an organization. They hear all the opinions, but then they also make a clear

decision about what should and shouldn't be done. Because leaders who have unclear

messages talk about creating friction, you're gonna spend all sorts of time discerning what the

boss actually means.

Shankar Vedantam:

I think partly what we're saying here is over and over, you need people who understand how

different parts of an organization fit together. And especially as organizations get big and

complex, someone who's worked in HR and has worked in supply chain and has worked in

finance and has worked in this, that and the other, knows how these things actually interact with

each other and has seen how the problem looks from different points of view.

Bob Sutton:

Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And to me, that's sort of the hallmark of somebody who's a

good friction fixer because they're always learning more about how different pieces of the

system fit together.

Shankar Vedantam:

So Bob, you've been married for nearly 40 years as we're having this conversation. Your 40th

wedding anniversary is coming up next year. Talk about the idea of friction in relationships and

when they're useful, when they're not, how they've played a role in your life.

Bob Sutton:

Well, yeah, well, you know, I guess the opening line, what's the supreme song? You can't hurry

love. So my wife Marina, who is, she's a lawyer, she's a rational person. We do not make

decisions quickly in our family if they're important. And so we started living together, well, when I

was 21 and she was 19, and we lived together seven years before we got married. And the

story is that, so I'm an academic, and at this point, I was a brand new academic at Stanford. I

was just starting to be considered for the tenure process. And my late father-in-law's name was

Rod Park. He stood up and gave us a toast. He was, at that time, he was provost at UC

Berkeley. He understood academics. And he said, so Bob is used to a seven-year tenure clock,

and at seven years, they make a decision up or out. And he said, Marina has made the same

decision. She's given him the seven-year test, and it's up. So that was sort of the beginning of

that, and you can't hurry love. It takes a long time. And some people do get married after their

first dates, but I'm not sure that's a good idea.

Shankar Vedantam:

But can you talk about the idea that in some ways, relationships themselves are, they're not like

products. They're not things that you can rush to market. They're things that in fact take time,

and they grow, and they ripen, and they ripen at their own speed. And sometimes hurrying them

along, or wishing that they were something that they are not is a fool's errand.

Bob Sutton:

Yes, it is a fool's errand. And if we're going to do a little bit more empirically, there are a whole

set of studies, and sometimes academics call this prior joint experience. But you can look at

startups that are founded by people who have worked together. They tend to be more

successful at Stanford, way back to Yulet Packard. Instagram was founded by people who

worked together before. Into it, you can look at research on surgery that if your anesthesiologist

and surgeon have done more procedures together, especially at the same hospital, your

outcomes are likely to be better. There is a point where relationships get stale and you've got to

make things fresh. But this idea of when people have worked together before, that they tend to

be more effective, especially for difficult, complex tasks, is something that's very important. So

this notion that working things out takes time is important.

Shankar Vedantam:

Bob Sutton is a psychologist at the Stanford School of Engineering. With Huggie Rao, he is coauthor of The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and The

Wrong Things Harder. Bob, thanks so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Bob Sutton:

Shankar, it's just been remarkable. And thank you for reading the book so closely. I felt like I've

had a quiz on a book that I spent seven years writing, and I even forgot some parts. So thank

you.

Shankar Vedantam:

Well, you get an A+, Bob. You get an A+. Thank you. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain

Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel,

Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive

producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you know someone who would enjoy today's

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word of mouth recommendations make a huge difference in helping to connect new listeners to

the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.