The "No Asshole Rule" - Professor Robert Sutton

As an employment lawyer who quite regularly acts on behalf of employees who have been victimized by workplace harassment, discrimination and bullying - often with very dire professional and medical consequences - I was intrigued by this review of Stanford Professor Robert I. Sutton's new book, The No Asshole Rule - Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn't:

This meticulously researched book, which grew from a much buzzed-about article in the Harvard Business Review, puts into plain language an undeniable fact: the modern workplace is beset with assholes. Sutton (Weird Ideas that Work), a professor of management science at Stanford University, argues that assholes-those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their aggression on the less powerful-poison the work environment, decrease productivity, induce qualified employees to quit and therefore are detrimental to businesses, regardless of their individual effectiveness. He also makes the solution plain: they have to go.

Lawyer-coach Julie Fleming-Brown also reviews Professor Sutton's work in her blog, Life at the Bar:

Dr. Robert I. Sutton is a champion of the civilized workplace, created and maintained through careful enforcement of the “no asshole rule.” Expanding and deepening his 2004 Harvard Business Review article entitled “More Trouble Than They’re Worth,” Sutton’s forthcoming book The No Asshole Rule (to be published on February 22, 2007, by Warner Business Books, but apparently shipping now through Amazon) offers valuable tips for eliminating or avoiding nasty people in business. In less than 200 pages, Bob explains how to identify a workplace asshole (even how to tell if you’re the asshole) and describes the damage these assholes wreak on the organizations in which they work and the clients and colleagues with whom they come into contact. He even addresses how to handle a workplace asshole, while warning of the dangers of “asshole poisoning.” This is a must-read. Seriously.

With a bit of Googling, I came upon Work Matters, Professor Sutton's blog, and this short video clip, in which he introduces himself and his basic thesis.

In the video clip, he also shares a rather humourous anecdote. In his original article submission to the pristine Harvard Business Review, he intentionally included the "a-word" in the draft an exaggerated eight times, hoping that at best, perhaps one might survive editing. When the article was ultimately published, however, Sutton was surprised to find that all eight remained intact. His career path thus becase inexorably linked to this epithet.

Finally, for the courageous, take this self-test to find out if you might just be one of the people Professor Sutton is talking about...

- Garry J. Wise, Toronto

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