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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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There s this notion that sometimes there is good friction because it forces you to slow down and think.
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And other times there s bad friction where you just drive people crazy who are just trying to accomplish something simple.
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They just want to get done.
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So our book is about how to tell the difference between the two.
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And once you figure out whether you want more or less friction, how you deal with that challenge.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 409 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast.
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A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week.
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eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, be better, and make a meaningful impact in the world.
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I have a special invitation for you.
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I m excited to introduce our new Passionstruck quiz, which comes out of my new book, Passionstruck.
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It s a unique opportunity for you to discover where you stand on the Passionstruck continuum.
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Take the quiz at passionstruck.com.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it, earlier in the week, I interviewed Dr. Jud Brewer, who comes back to the show to discuss his new book, The Hunger Habit, which is based on his deeply researched plan
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proven to help us understand what is going on in our brains so that we can heal the guilt and frustration we experience around eating.
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And if you liked that episode or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star rating and review.
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They go such a long way in strengthening the PassionStruck community, where we can help more people create an intentional life.
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And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Today, we re diving into the world of organizational dynamics with a remarkable guest, Robert Sutton, a distinguished Stanford professor and best-selling author.
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Recognized as one of the top 10 B-School all-stars by Businessweek, Sutton s influence extends far beyond the academic realm, reshaping contemporary business thinking.
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In this episode, we delve into his new revolutionary book, The Friction Project, co-written with Huggy Rau.
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In every organization, friction is an unwelcome guest.
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It can make things harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible.
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Yet it can sometimes serve as a constructive purpose.
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The challenge lies in discerning and managing these opposing forces.
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Our interview guides listeners in becoming adept friction fixers, enhancing workplace efficiency without exasperating the problems.
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Our conversation begins by exploring how effective friction fixers guide as guardians of others  time.
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Sutton offers insightful friction forensics empowering you to identify and tackle harmful organizational friction while harnessing beneficial friction.
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He shares strategies for redefining friction issues and practical approaches for organizational design and repair.
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And as we dive deeper, Sutton unravels the causes and remedies for five prevalent friction issues.
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Oblivious leadership, addiction to more, disconnected workflows, jargon overuse, and the chaos of fast-paced teams.
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We conclude with key takeaways for leading your friction project.
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Join us on this enlightening journey with Robert Sutton.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now.
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Let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely thrilled today to have Bob Sutton on PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Bob.
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Oh, it s great to be here, John.
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Like everyone, we all make mistakes.
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And I was supposed to interview you a couple of weeks ago about this incredible book that I m holding up here called The Asshole Survival Guide, which I m just bringing up because I love this book.
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And I want to give you some kudos for it before we go into your newest book, The Friction Project.
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But for anyone who needs to learn how to deal with people who treat you like dirt, this book is an absolute one you need to look at.
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So I wanted to bring that up at first.
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Thanks for reading not one, but two of my books.
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We were joking before, you re like a two time loser.
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So I appreciate it.
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So I think if we re going to discuss the Friction Project, the best starting point would be to get a definition for you for what does friction mean in the context of an organization?
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Well, to us, friction is any time that an employee, a customer, it could be the resident of a state, citizen, that they re trying to accomplish something and they re forced to slow down more than they want.
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And sometimes that s good and sometimes it s bad.
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We almost called the book walking in the muck.
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I even got book covers, Stuck in the Muck, Walking in the Muck.
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But we ve all had that feeling like, why is this so hard?
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And that s the problem that got us going into the book and that the book focuses on the good and the bad.
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But it s just that feeling things are a little harder or a lot harder than you want them to be.
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Yeah, that s interesting.
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You call it the Friction Project because it s a project you ve actually been working on with your co-author Huggy for
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What, seven plus years?
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Oh gosh, seven plus, since you re an author, when the book s done, so it s about eight years.
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And Huggy and I, where it got started, kind of two things.
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One was our book before was called Scaling Up Excellence, and there s all these big organizations that we work with.
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Well, they were little when we first met them, and it was so easy for them to move fast.
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I consulted to the head of HR of Facebook when they had 200 people.
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And they grew to 400.
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Everybody in Facebook, we could all fit in one room that wasn t even that big.
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Then, same with Google, same with Salesforce.
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So out here in the Bay Area, as all those organizations got larger and more complex, things just got harder to do.
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And people talk about the good old days, but it was like their dreams came true.
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They had grown a giant organization and they didn t like living in it.
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That was one cause.
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And then the other one on a more personal level,
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is that in my own university, Stanford University, and other organizations I deal with, things I would want to get done would be very difficult.
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And the book does start out talking about some of the dysfunctions in my own university, too many emails, too long, too much committee work, too much other kinds of red tape.
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So that was the bad news that got us interested in it.
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But along the ways, and we ll talk about it, a lot of good news came up, too.
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It was eight years.
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We just went on and on.
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I didn t think it was ever going to
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Well, I know exactly where you re coming from because I mentioned before we came on, I have my own book coming on and I spent about seven years doing research myself.
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So by the time it gets out, it becomes nine years of research.
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And the other part, there s an old line, which I ve really related to, which is there s no finished books.
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There s only exhausted authors.
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And it is funny because I did a lot of work with product developers at a point in my life, especially David Kelly at the famous design firm IDEO.
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And he always used to say, every product we ve ever developed, we want to do one more iteration before our client rips it out of our hands.
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And I feel the same way as an author, because just having read this book, I m proud of our book, but gee, I d just like to go through one more time and edit it.
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But you got to eventually let it go.
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I know exactly what you mean.
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I think I re-edited my book probably 20, 25 times.
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And even now, if I had the chance, I d want to re-edit it because it s six months beyond.
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You see so many things that kind of change your perspective and you want to go back and re-tweak things or add more data or whatever it is.
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One thing I wanted to make clear to the audience is that this book is not just for people who are in large organizations.
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This applies equally to entrepreneurs, to small businesses, medium-sized businesses.
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And something, Bob, about my own background is I spent time in management strategy consulting, big four consulting.
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I was a leader in large enterprises.
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I was a C-level at Dell.
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And then I ve also been in the private equity world and worked with small and medium sized companies.
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And the thing I found across all of them is that regardless of the size, you can all create friction in how you re operating.
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That s a great point.
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There s a class that I ve been involved in teaching with occasionally at Stanford that s called Launchpad.
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And we talk about it in the book.
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My colleague, Perry Claiborne, is the person who leads it, who, like you, is a real entrepreneur.
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He founded his own company, Atlas Snowshoes.
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He actually built the modern snowshoe in a lab or in a shop at Stanford and then spent seven years growing the company and sold it.
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So he s a real entrepreneur, built the thing, built the company, sold it.
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And he teaches this class called Launchpad.
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And remember, a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, a company came out of there called Pulse News.
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And I remember talking to the founders and they had hired 12 people and they had all 12 people in a room and it was sort of chaos.
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And they were confused.
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They were having product development problems, but it was only after they
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They broke them into three little groups and then had a little afternoon coordination meeting.
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Then they started getting things going.
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Even in that case, growing from three people to 12 people created a bunch of friction, a bunch of slowness that caused coordination and confusion.
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You just calculate the number of different connections between 12 people versus three.
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It just goes up exponentially.
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Yeah, so even in an organization that small, you can have friction problems.
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Yeah, that s a great example.
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And I had really wanted to interview Perry.
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He wasn t available.
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So I got the next Becks thing and I interviewed Jeremy Utley about their book, Ideal Flows.
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Love the work that those two guys are doing.
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Yeah, those guys, I ve been very close to them.
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I ve taught with them for years.
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And it s Jeremy s the flashy guy who does the talking.
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I teach with them a lot.
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And Perry s like the quiet guy who keeps people on task.
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Perry s like the hard ass.
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And really a loving hard ass.
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He just loves, he s one of the best teachers at Stanford, Perry.
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He might be the best.
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For working with a small group of students, he s the best person I ve ever worked with.
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Because he s so good at getting in there and getting people to grind it out.
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I really admire him a lot.
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Well, speaking about grinding it out, I d like to grind out a little bit more details on what you mean by bad or destructive friction.
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Are there some examples you can give?
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In terms of bad or destructive friction.
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So just let me ask a question.
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Do you want me to just tell some stories?
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Do you want me to go through our typology?
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Which would you prefer?
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What would be most useful?
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Well, why don t you tell the story of Google Glass
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So there s lots of examples in the book of bad friction.
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Just for example, there was one large firm that Bain worked with, and they had a weekly executive committee meeting.
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And there was so much preparation, it was taking 300,000 hours a year, so many pre-meetings and so forth.
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long emails.
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One organization that I work with, the 400 executive vice presidents reported being overwhelmed with Slack messages.
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So we know there s all that sort of, if you will, what do you call it, bad friction.
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But one of the things that really got us interested during the course of working on the book
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is that there were times when things were too easy to do in organizations, especially for powerful people.
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The classic example of this in just in the last two weeks, I ve had a member of the Google Glass team say, Oh no, you wrote about that.
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You re right.
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And so what happened was there was a prototype of a sort of like computers meet eyeglasses.
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So you can have a little window and see what s going on.
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Google X labs, they call it.
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And Sergey saw it and he fell in love with it and he ripped it out of the hands of the designers, put it on the marketplace before it was ready.
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And by the way, did things like invited famous people to a gathering in Paris and had skydivers and all this sort of stuff.
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And it turned out to be one of the worst products ever.
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And to me, that s an example of a situation where there wasn t enough friction.
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We also, as a contrast, in the book talk about Elizabeth Holmes as an example.
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She was constantly frustrated because, for example, she couldn t get her blood testing device that didn t work on U.S.
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Army helicopters.
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And the U.S.
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Army folks said, no, you can t put it on the helicopter because it doesn t have FDA approval.
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She hadn t done that and she didn t get FDA approval in part because that thing didn t work.
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And now she s heading to jail in the next few months.
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In an interesting contrast, and we were just talking about Perry Claiborne and Jeremy Utley, these amazing two women who started a company called Sequel, Greta Meyer and Amanda Calabrese.
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Sequel is reinventing the modern tampon.
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Talk about a big market.
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And they ll say there hasn t been much change in it in the last 80 years.
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Well, they took every Stanford class.
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Unlike Elizabeth Holmes, they graduated.
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They got $5 million in venture capital.
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They just got FDA approval.
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And they re doing all the stuff required to go through.
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It s the hoops.
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But it seems to me that getting FDA approval is a good idea in this case.
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And there was some way they might have been able to skirt around it.
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But to us, there s this notion that sometimes there is good friction because it forces you to slow down and think.
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And other times there s bad friction where you just drive people crazy who are just trying to accomplish something simple.
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They just want to get done.
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So our book is about how to tell the difference between the two.
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And once you figure out whether you want more or less friction, how you deal with that challenge.
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Yeah, I ve got an interesting story about this that kind of relates to this Google Glass.
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I have a friend of mine who is a former F-18 pilot.
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And when he was in a squadron, they came out with this new helmet that most modern pilots use now that kind of gives them a 360 degree view of the battlefield.
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But when he was going through the training, they were rushed through it because they wanted to get these things into their hands and deployed.
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And I think it was one of those things where maybe there should have been a little bit more friction in the process.
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And unfortunately for him, it was, I think the first or second time he was wearing it and he and his commanding officer were dogfighting and he came out of this turn and was just getting distracted by everything in the helmet.
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And
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Before he knew it, he was 300 feet above the water going Mach 1 and ended up surviving unbelievably.
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But it s an example where, as you talk about in the book, sometimes there s good friction and sometimes there s bad friction.
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But you say that a frictionless organization isn t ideal.
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Why is that?
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It isn t ideal because some things should be difficult.
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We have various diagnostic questions, but one of the diagnostic questions that we start out with is essentially, and this is based on Daniel Kahneman s work on situations when you should slow down and make decisions versus go fast.
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And situations where you re in a cognitive minefield, you don t know what s happening, and you ve got to slow down and figure out what s going on, instead of rushing in some direction where you don t know what to do.
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One of the examples we talk about in the book is Noam Bardin, who is the founding CEO of Waze, the navigation software.
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He had an interesting situation, which Kahneman actually also talks about, where early on, they got Series B financing, so they got $30 million.
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Venture capitalists wanted them to hire people, do product development.
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But the problem was when people downloaded Waze, a couple weeks later, they wouldn t be using it.
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They had all these problems.
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So he just put on the brakes for six weeks and tried to figure out what was going on.
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And then once his team figured out how to fix the product, well, they started making changes and then they started hiring people.
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To us, we ve been thinking more and more of the gas and the brakes analogy.
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The F1 Formula Ones and NASCAR drivers who win the races aren t the ones who keep the pedal to the metal the whole time.
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They d be dead.
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They break on the turns.
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They have pit stops to get gas.
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And in some ways we think of organizational life that way.
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So that s the fast and the slow.
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Another thing that I think is really important
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I ve been studying creativity for years, is that when you look at what it takes to do creative work, it is not an efficient, fast, frictionless process.
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It s really a lot of work to develop something new.
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It s a lot of work actually to remove friction from organizations.
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So you ve got to slow down and fix things, if you will, or figure out what s going on.
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My favorite example of this
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is when Jerry Seinfeld got interviewed by Harvard Business Review, which to me is bizarre as it is.
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And they asked him, they said, so could McKinsey have helped you and Larry David develop a more efficient process?
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Because we know how much friction there was, and how much you guys fought, and how it s wore everybody down.
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And he said, who s McKinsey?
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And then they told him, and he said, are they funny?
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And they said, they re not funny.
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He said, I don t need them.
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He said, the easy way is the wrong way.
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The hard way is the right way.
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You ve got to really grind it out.
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And if you look at organizations that we ve worked with, especially Ed Catmull from Pixar, who was president of Pixar for, I think, 28 years, we ve talked with him a lot over the years.
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And he always talks about at Pixar, we don t really think about efficiency.
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We think about iterating over and over again until it is right.
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I m not saying that there aren t ways to create a process more efficient.
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Maybe one way, since you had Jeremy Utley on your show, is to be better at pulling the plug on bad ideas, as opposed to trying to limit the ideas that you develop, for example.
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But the upshot of our perspective is that good leaders are always thinking about what ought to be hard and ought to be easy, and coming up with solutions.
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And oh, there s one more thing that, since you re talking about the military folks, there s a lot of times in life when people suffer a little bit and struggle.
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that they get more committed to one another and they get more committed to the product and things like that.
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That s why every military, every sorority and fraternity has a little bit of hazing.
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Hopefully it doesn t hurt anybody, but the more people struggled for something, the more they will love it independently of the value, which is Ikea is the company that s definitely figured that out, that all that struggle you have getting through the store and assembling your furniture, that s what it makes you love it a little bit more.
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They call that the Ikea effect.
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So there s a bunch of reasons, both emotional and rational, why you might want to make things a little bit difficult.
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I just wanted to highlight a couple things you said.
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I m glad you brought up ways I was going to bring it up anyhow, because I ended up interviewing
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Levine, who is Noam s co-founder of Waze last year, and got to hear his perspective on the same story and how it was so important that they doubled down on fixing the issues or else they never would have become what they became.
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And then I went to the Naval Academy.
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So one of the things that we always talk about is how much
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easier every class after us has added going through because they keep taking friction out of the system and it makes it easier and easier for people to get through.
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I graduated in 93.
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I talked to someone who graduated in 74 and they go, you didn t have a real plebe summer.
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Our plebe summer would, and then you would talk to someone in 1960.
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They didn t have a plebe summer.
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Ours was so much harder.
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One of my heroes of the book is Carl Liebert, who also went to the Naval Academy.
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I ve been hanging out with Carl for probably the last seven or eight years.
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Going to the Naval Academy, being a supply officer, that was why he was successful.
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He was also on the basketball team that made it to the final eight.
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I think the last time it happened.
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He s a very tall guy.
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But Carl always talks about going to the Naval Academy.
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But he also talks about how he learned as a supply officer that the best way to figure out what to order was to go to the cruise mess.
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to figure out what they wanted to eat.
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So he said, I d spend half the time eating with the folks on the front line, as opposed to just eating with the officer s mess, I guess.
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You would know this better than me.
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But Carl s one of my heroes, and we talk about him quite a bit in the book, actually.
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especially when he worked at Home Depot and he was head of supply chain and they couldn t figure out problems they re having in the stores.
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So he and some of his engineers, they would work the night shift from 11 or from midnight to 7am to see what would happen when employees got the boxes and packed them to figure out the sort of snags in the system.
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So that s another thing that good friction fixers do is they look at the handoffs in the system.
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So Carl s one of my heroes and we talk about it a lot in the book.
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Yeah, I m glad you brought him up.
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I don t know Carl personally, but I knew of him because I was at Lowe s for many years.
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I ended up doing many of the same things he did.
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We had this major project underway that we were trying to create one common view for the customer to view the whole company.
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And as we were going through this,
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and you start looking at what I call accidental or spaghetti architecture that comes over time with your systems, you find out just how much friction you have put into the system over 15, 20, 25 years and how that makes it so difficult for people to have a seamless customer experience.
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So I think the work he did at the Home Depot was pretty pivotal in what they re now able to do and how they re fulfilling orders for their customers.
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Carl s Mr. Supply Chain.
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And he s also funny because he s been a senior executive since I ve known him at USAA, at AutoNation, and then Keller Williams at all three.
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And the first thing he does is he goes to the front lines.
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So when he was at Keller Williams, the first thing he wanted to do was to hang out with the agents.
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And when he was at AutoNation, he was working Saturdays in the parts department to see how things work.
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He s just one of those guys who I really admire him.
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He just goes straight to the front lines.
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Well, it s extremely important because if the people on the front lines don t understand their purpose in serving customers or making an impact or the company strategy, they re the ones who are bringing in the money.
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I remember when I was at Lowe s, they would always say headquarters doesn t have cash registers.
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So the most important people in the whole company are the people in the stores.
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Oh, that s wonderful.
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We always thought you re serving your customers, but you re also serving the people who serve your customers.
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So it s, I think it s a really important thing for people to take away.
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So how do you differentiate between beneficial and detrimental friction in an organization?
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And what advice would you give to listeners on identifying and implementing each one?
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Being authors, we probably have too many different criteria for this, but I ll pick two or three.
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One of the first ones for us is when you re making a decision is, well, is it a reversible or irreversible decision?
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Jeff Bezos of Amazon calls this one-way versus two-way doors.
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So if it s a two-way door, if it s reversible for your organization, then trying a prototype, even if you re as big as Amazon, launching a product, well, it s not going to kill the company.
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And in that case, if it s a two-way door, you can be experimental.
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But if it s a one-way door, if it s selling the company, if it s a product launch that you re betting the entire company on, or it s buying a company, for example, in that situation, you want to slow down and assess the situation.
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And related to that, and we ve touched on this already, is a lot of it depends on whether it s a routine or a new thing for you.
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If it s something you ve done over and over again and what s right,
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as opposed to something you d have to build.
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So for us, that would be one of the key sort of criteria.
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Another thing, which we haven t talked about yet, but I ve been enamored with this, is that in the life that we live in, there s always so much pressure to move so fast.
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And I love moving fast.
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I m a fundamentally impatient person.
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But there s really good research that shows that slowing down and savoring the good things in life is actually
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one of the best things in life, whether it s a good meal, a conversation.
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awe of nature.
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It s like you don t want to rush through a visit to Yosemite or Yellowstone or something like that.
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And so there s this wonderful research on savoring.
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A guy named Fred Bryant s been studying this for some 20 years.
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We talk about this a little bit in the book.
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Just as an example, one thing that I think good leaders do is that they slow down to celebrate.
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We talk about the notion of developing a ta-da list rather than a to-do list.
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There s also that sort of notion of, is it time to slow down and savor things?
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Oh, there s one other thing that I want to talk about that s really important here, which is that there s some interesting new research that looks at the relationship between the IQs that people have and how they solve problems.
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It came out of Germany.
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It s published in Nature just at the beginning of the year.
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and the end of last year.
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And what it showed was that people with higher IQs, they solve simple problems more quickly, which has been in the academic literature for years.
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And in fact, even an IQ test, they will look at speed of problem solving.
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But it turns out that people with higher IQs solve complex problems more slowly and more accurately because they take time to figure out how things fit together.
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An example of that, one of my heroes of the book, one of our heroes is we talk about the people at Sevilla.
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So Sevilla is a nonprofit in Michigan, and it was founded by a guy named Michael Brennan.
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Michael Brennan had been head of the United Way in southeastern Michigan, where Detroit is and so forth.
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And there was a benefits form that his team found out and he discovered that s completed by 2.5 million Michiganders a year for things like food,
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health insurance, things like that, just cash for people who need it.
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And it was 42 pages long, a thousand questions.
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One question was, when was your child conceived?
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So that s an example of a sort of crazy bit of friction.
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The first time I met him, we were at Stanford.
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He had the form on the floor and rolled it out and showed it to us and was complaining about it.
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This is even before Sevilla was founded.
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But the interesting thing that Michael Brennan s team did was that they actually took the time to bring in all the constituencies, to work with the leaders of the agency that were responsible for the form, to come up with six or seven different prototypes, and then to roll it out slowly throughout the system.
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Now they ve got a new form that s 80% shorter and takes half the amount of time, which really reduces the load on everybody.
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Certainly the 2.5 million citizens, but people in the department who have to process the form and look for errors, there s far fewer errors.
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And they had to comply with 1700 pages of regulations too, just things like that to do a new form.
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So that s a good example.
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Michael Brennan would put it
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is to just slow down and get the people aboard and to get it right.
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And now the form is implemented and there s 2.5 million Michiganders are each spending half the amount of time they would have two years ago.
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And to me, that sort of is a good analogy of the difference between when to go slow and when to go fast.
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With something simple, we want it to be quick and easy and think of all the friction that his team has taken out of the system by slowing down and fixing things.
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One of the things I love when authors do is come up with catchy names that people are going to remember and what you just described as someone who s a friction fixer.
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I love that term, friction fixer.
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One of my favorite friction fixing stories is the one with Jim McKelvey and Jack Dorsey.
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when they came up with the idea for Square, because the idea was really born out of Jim s glassblowing and not being able to take payment to purchase a piece of the art that he was doing.
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And then as they started getting into this problem, they realized, and it almost stopped them several times, how much friction there was in the entire system and how much friction was purposely put there
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by some of the payment processing companies to make it difficult to find a way to change the way that they were doing it because it was going to cause them to have to do some shifts.
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And so the way that they were able to figure that out and create this device that eliminated a lot of that friction was pretty remarkable to me.
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It s really funny.
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Almost all my best friends are product designers just because by accident we re on Stanford and product designers like looking for situations where there s upset people, because for them that s a sign of, oh, I can make some money here and I can fix stuff.
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And I remember the first time I heard that from David Kelly, the founder of IDEO and is also a very close friend of Steve Jobs is that they would look for people who are upset.
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Yeah, there s some money to be made there.
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And that sure worked for Square.
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So that s a great example of it.
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I thought I would just give a definition for the listeners so they understand what a friction fixer is.
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They re individuals who see resolving workplace issues as a fundamental part of their job.
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But sometimes,
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When you re in one of these larger companies, you see your role, but you think, man, I want to fix things, but I don t know how with limited resources or influence that I m in that I can be a fixing friction person.
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How do you recommend that really anyone can do this?
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Well, first of all, yes, the more power that you have, let s be realistic, the bigger we call it your cone of friction, the more you can have an influence.
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But to us, almost anybody, depending where they are, and the language we use is you can be a grease person or a gunk person.
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There are some people, and we all know who these people are, who if you go to them, they will say no, they will make things more complicated for you, and they may even take some pleasure in watching you struggle.
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And then there were other people, we call them grease people, who when you go to them, they see their job as easing your pain, either by interpreting the rules or helping you navigate the system.
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And to me, we all have a cone of friction.
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And the example that we use in the book, one of my favorite, which we re now following up on, was one of the most astounding experiences I had during the writing of the book, which was just by accident.
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I went to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which is
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having been in California my whole life, traditionally a horrible experience.
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And so I allotted three hours to go through the DMV.
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It was to change, my mother had recently passed away and I had to change the title for her car.
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So I had to get a wet signature, they call it, and go to the DMV.
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I get there, there s 60 people in line, 7.30 in the morning.
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My goodness, I m going to be here all day.
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And then at 740, this guy walks down the line with forms and he talks to each person, he gives them a form if they need it, he tells them to get out of line if it s something the DMV can t do.
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He gets to me, he gives me the form, he tells me what window to go through, and I m out of there by 8.15 completely confused.
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He was nice.
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The people at the windows were nice.
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I knew exactly what to do.
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It was amazing.
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And Huggy and I have since been following up and we re trying to do a case study with the leaders of the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
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They see it as their job to reduce the burden on citizens throughout the state.
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So there was one process, it s called getting real ID, that they ve cut from 28 to eight minutes.
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That s pretty good.
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Eight minutes in the DMV, it seems almost impossible.
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The line I ve been using for Stanford University and also just for Google, Alphabet, which has serious friction problems, they have really become a big, dumb company.
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And I hate to say it, but I think all my friends who work there would agree with that too, is if the DMV can do it, you can do it.
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Oh, so the guy who s head of the DMV is actually very impressive because he really does see himself in this line of the book or phrase is being a trustee of the time of the residents of the state of California.
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And he behaves that way, both in terms of technology, culture, that s the perspective he s spreading through the agency.
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And it s not perfect, but the improvement is really impressive.
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Well, speaking of trustees and the cone of friction, I love the five mottos that you had in the book for how trustees can protect time and boaster performance of their people.
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And I m going to give them, but I m only going to ask you about one of them.
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One is it s like mowing the lawn to its organizations are malleable prototypes three.
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Celebrate and reward doers, not posers.
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Fourth is focus on fixing things, not who to blame.
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And fifth is honor people who avert friction fiascos, not just firefighters.
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But I want to go back to celebrate and reward doers, not posers.
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Well, this is a theme that there s some things that my coauthor, Jeff Pfeffer, and I have been writing about the smart talk trap for years.
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And there are many rewards, at least short-term rewards for the people in organizations who say brilliant things, have great plans and so forth.
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But the people who are opposers give the speech, talk about the great idea, and then you never see them again.
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People who are doers, those are the people on the ground who grind it out and actually make sure that things get done.
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And it s very difficult often to tell the difference between the two unless you hang out for a while.
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And so that s one of our perspectives and the example we use in the book.
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is one of my heroes who also went to the U.S.
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Military Academy.
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She went to West Point.
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Her name is Becky Margiata, amazing person.
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She led this campaign called the 100,000 Homes Campaign that did find homes for 100,000 homeless Americans, which is quite a feat.
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Her team initially spent years in Times Square in New York City to come up with both their approach and philosophy before they scaled it out.
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But when they were doing the 100,000 Homes campaign, she realized that there were certain people who were just posers who would come up with these great plans.
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She called them hollow Easter bunnies.
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And so there was them.
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And then I ll center this slightly.
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When she was in the military, she describes it as actually a problem that happened in Iraq.
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And she had to wake up her commanding officer in the middle of the night.
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And her commanding officer rubs her eyes and says to Becky, who s effing this chicken?
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Which means, who s in charge of fixing this thing?
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During the course of the campaign, Becky used to give the chicken effing talk.
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And when they found people who were actually finding homes for homeless people, they give them a little metal rooster as a reward.
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So I like that idea, because usually it s the talkers who get the rewards and not the doers.
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And I don t know, given your career, John, you probably talk the same way, but somebody like Becky will often quote the line of strategies for amateurs, implementation or logistics are for professionals.
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And I ve heard Becky say variations of that many times because her focus is on actually getting stuff done, not just talking about it.
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Thank you for bringing those things up.
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And Bob, I have to tell you, when I was a senior executive, one of the things as I went on job searches was how long they took.
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I remember being told by a recruiter one time that Deloitte wanted to hire me to be a partner.
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And I said, what s the process?
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And they go, well, it takes about 18 months and you go through eight to 10 rounds of interviews.
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And it reminds me
3
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of when I went to Microsoft, I had been a CIO at Dell and I was being asked to come join Microsoft as their CIO because I knew Balmer at the time.
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I remember going in and it was the same thing.
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It was like having to go through eight different rounds of interviews.
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And when you start thinking about that, your probability when you re going out there and every time you re meeting four to five different people,
3
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So think about you have to interview with 30 to 40 people of you not hitting it off with one person or them having a disagreement, or maybe you re just not on in that interview.
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I like your story because I know Laszlo Bock, he s at Humo now, founded Humo.
3
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But when he was at Google, Google was having this huge problem where one of the founders wanted to interview every single person who they were hiring.
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And then as Laszlo got in, they were still having issues with hiring.
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What did he do to fix it?
3
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Laszlo, who s this wonderful guy.
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And this is one of those classic things that we know in organizations.
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What got you to one place is not going to get you to the next.
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And what got you here won t get you there.
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That sort of line.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Marshall Goldsmith.
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In the early days, in fact, Jeff Pfeffer and I actually, I remember we interviewed Larry Page in 2002.
3
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I have the tape, I actually have the transcript.
3
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And Larry was saying, a lot of people at Stanford Computer Science are mad at us because we interviewed them 8, 10, 15, 20 times because we want to make sure they re technically adept.
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And they re socially adept because we want the right people to scale the company, which actually really made sense when they had 100 people.
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Honestly, that made sense.
3
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And they had just gotten their venture capital money.
3
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But this tradition continued and Laszlo gets there.
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I remember doing the fact checking for this the first time for the Wall Street Journal.
3
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We said 8, 10, 12, 15 times.
3
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And we sent it to Laszlo and he said, I came up across one, 25 interviews for an engineer, not for a CIO like you, just for a regular Google sort of engineer.
3
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What he did was he put in the simple rule that if you need to do more than four interviews, you need written approval from me.
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liberal bit of a speed bump, friction, and he said he couldn t believe the number of interviews that were reduced.
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If you look at that, the amount of time, and you know how hard it is to schedule interviews, like I can just imagine all the assistance and all the calendaring, you end up alienating some of the best candidates who don t even bother interviewing at Google, they just go to Facebook.
4
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which was the cooler company by then anyway.
4
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So that was the other problem that they have.
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People would do three interviews and they d get a job at Facebook and they d be working at the cool company and Google was no longer the coolest kid on the block.
4
SPEAKER_01
So they were also losing good candidates.
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But the point there, and I think this is an important point, is that sometimes that putting in some good friction
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can make it harder to put bad friction in the system.
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And there s another example, which isn t in the book, but is something that we ve gotten quite interested in, is that at least in every large organization I ve ever worked in,
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It s just filled with different applications, the size of the tech stack.
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It s every time that you work with a new group, you ve got to learn a new application.
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At Stanford, there s one group I work with.
4
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They forced me to learn Asana and Salesforce, which are two things I didn t know.
4
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And this problem, sometimes it s called the credit card problem.
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It happens in a lot of organizations because what happens is almost anybody who has the authority to spend, say, $200, $300 can just buy the software and then everybody else has to use it.
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And one of the companies that we know, this comes from Paul Leonardi, who s at UC Santa Barbara, one of the companies that we know, the CTO just put the brakes on.
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If you were going to renew any software app or you re going to buy a new one,
4
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you had a written justification to him.
4
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They discovered things, for example, like they were paying for four different versions of Slack and only needed to pay for one.
4
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Of course, they had eight different sort of video platforms, Zoom and so forth.
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Within about a year, they had cut the tech stack from about 55 to about 20.
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And I love that example because we say things like, oh, top down authoritarian management is terrible and everybody should be able to do what they want.
4
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Well, I do believe in employees having autonomy and freedom and to design their work and do their work.
4
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But sometimes there s a tragedy of the commons that everybody adds something that they think is for the greater good.
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But in the end, the system slows down and suffers.
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The credit card problem, which Pauli and Artie has studied some, is a good example where having some friction and some centralization benefits the entire system.
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Because I don t know about you, but I get really tired of having to learn and switch between one software platform and another.
4
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And some of that is inevitable, but reducing the amount, that s something that reduces friction in the entire system.
4
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, it does.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, Bob, I wanted to actually go back to Microsoft because as you were talking, I remembered a story and I know you are familiar with Microsoft.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I love them.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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Well, when I went on that interview, one of the things I found, and this was probably 2011-ish, was that under Steve Ballmer, the way to get up was really through a lot of backstabbing or frontstabbing, whatever you had to do to climb the corporate ladder.
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And it just seemed like people were miserable.
4
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But I remember one of the interviews I went on was with this gentleman who had been there since around 1992.
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And his name happened to be Satya Nadella.
4
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And he was telling me that he had this vision that things were going to change.
4
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And sometimes I look back and the two or three years would have been very painful before he took over.
4
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But the changes that he has made, I just can t believe it.
4
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He took a company that no one wanted to work there anymore.
4
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And now it s become like the darling again that all these wicked software developers want to go to.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve been in the Stanford engineering school for 40 years and different employers become cool and uncool.
4
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When I got here, HP was the coolest.
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That s how long I ve been here.
4
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But it wasn t that long ago that Google and Facebook were the cool places to work.
4
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Now it s Microsoft.
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I just, I can t believe it.
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And this is, well as I do, but one of the things is if you want to create, and this is to us coordination and collaboration in a system, you need people to work together towards one common goal, as opposed to doing backstabbing and following your point.
4
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In the bomber era, the whole reward system
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and the culture was designed that you got ahead.
4
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And Satya talks about this publicly now, not just by doing good work, but by stopping people down on the way to the top and doing the backstabbing.
4
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They have completely changed the way we put it, is the definition of a superstar
4
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The definition of a superstar there is somebody who not only does great work, it s somebody who helps other people get ahead.
4
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But to your point, I remember in 2014, this is right when Satya took over, I gave a talk at the operating systems group to about 400 people.
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And the cool thing about Microsoft, I will say, which is the good part of the culture, it s a very radical candor culture.
4
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It always shocked me how openly people talk about the problems in the company, and I ve had a lot of interaction with them.
4
SPEAKER_01
So anyhow, so it s before my talk, and this guy, he s touring me around and he s showing me the various technologies.
4
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And he shows me the Microsoft phone, waves up the phone, which had been discontinued.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, see this phone?
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He said, one of the reasons it failed was because, well, we hated them so much, we wouldn t help them.
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He basically said that because that s a Microsoft culture.
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And I said, well, what about an iPhone?
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Oh, he said, we don t hate Apple as much as we hate each other.
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And he was being serious about that.
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And the cool thing about Microsoft was during the talk, I brought up that example and people talked about it openly and how Satya was already, and he d been CEO for like 10 minutes, was already taking steps to try to fix it.
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I ve worked with them a lot, especially the last three or four years, including some of the folks in corporate HR.
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They have changed, in addition to the rhetoric from Satya 1 Microsoft and so forth, they ve changed the reward system.
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They ve changed who they hire and they fire.
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They ve changed the definition of a superstar.
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They have really gone through systematically changing the culture in a way that, and you know this much better than I do, transforming a company with 200,000 people.
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It s an old company.
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It s like a 40-something-year-old company now.
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To me, it s one of the most amazing large transformations I ve ever seen.
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And it is a sign, to go back to be optimistic, that when people tell me that they can t fix things in their organization, going through the course of the book, we kept running into people who actually could fix things.
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So it is possible.
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We re not just victims of the large bureaucratic monsters that, if you will, oppress us in our life.
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So if the DMV can do it and Microsoft can do it, so can you.
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That s our perspective.
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Well, thinking of your book, I think what Satya did at Microsoft is excellent example of a friction fixer and using all the components of the help pyramid that you bring up because he reframed, he navigated, he shielded people.
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This whole idea of the neighborhood design and repair that you got to fix this in the small neighborhoods and then ultimately culminating in systematic change is a great way to think about how your pyramid works.
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That s a better description of the pyramid than I can give.
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The lines we start the chapter with is that friction fixing is it s part therapy and part organizational design, which is just stolen from a smart executive that we ran into.
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But there are two things that you need to do as a leader, I think.
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And one is to help people be in a place emotionally where they can get through the things that they can t fix for now.
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And I think that great leaders do that.
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is keep people going.
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But then you also have people focus on doing the little and big things required to fix organizations.
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And to me, and maybe we didn t emphasize this enough in the book, I was just thinking of Teresa Mable, who s at Harvard Business School.
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I m not sure you ve ever interviewed her.
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She wrote a book called The Progress Principle.
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Teresa is like the most, she s the most careful researcher I ve ever met in my life.
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Almost.
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She is very careful.
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What her research shows is essentially when she tracked teams and looked to see how innovative they were, the most innovative teams, they didn t have grand big ideas that they then implemented.
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They maybe had a guiding North star, but the key things was that the leaders would focus on making little bits of tiny emotional and objective, tangible progress every day and
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It s called the progress principle and keeping the wheel spinning and keeping people on track in this notion that great leaders, and this certainly applies to friction fixers, that they make things better by making one little tiny step at a time.
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And eventually it really does add up to something.
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And to me, that s what great friction fixers do.
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I talked about Michael Brennan at Sevilla.
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He didn t fix that form by doing it all at once and saying, here s the new form.
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It was a zillion tiny steps with hundreds of people.
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And now this form has been changed.
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And Satya is a beautiful example, because it wasn t one big thing.
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It was a whole bunch of little things.
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It s like, well, we re going to change our performance evaluation form.
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We re going to change how we interview people.
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We re going to change who we fire and who we hire, who s a superstar, and just a whole bunch of little things.
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And that s one thing that, at least for me, when I was young and impatient, I thought you could ride in on your white horse and kill everybody and everything would be fixed.
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Organizational change doesn t happen that way.
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It happens one little tiny step at a time.
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No, you re absolutely right.
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And I actually write about it in my book.
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I call it the bee and turtle effect.
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I basically profile how Elon Musk is able to keep repeating these performances because he does the same thing.
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He has that big, long-term view like the turtle in his mind.
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the daily micro-choices that he has the organization making, they re all like a bee focused on incremental improvements they make along the way that then turn into significant progress over time.
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Elon is somebody I admire less than I used to.
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I m serious.
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I think that having too much power is not great for human beings.
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It may have happened to his brain a little bit.
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So I admire him less than I used to, to tell you the truth.
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I still do admire his ability to just be so brave and so bold, but I just wish he would be a little less cruel in the process, to be honest.
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Yeah, I hear you.
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Well, while we didn t even get a chance to talk about some of the best aspects of the book where you go through the five most common and damaging friction traps, but I m going to just mention each one.
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And then I wanted you to talk about one.
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One is oblivious leaders, another is addition sickness, broken connections, where you talk about your friend, Carl, jargon, monoxide, and then fast and frenzied people.
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But I was hoping that you could talk about addressing addition sickness and maybe do it through being a subtraction specialist that you talk about with Ryan Holmes.
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Sure.
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So one of the things, and as with every business book, it s not like we invented this stuff.
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This stuff s been around.
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One of the things that we talk about in the book, have a chapter and so forth, is that if you look at how human beings are wired, there s actually a large and impressive body of research that shows that we as human beings, our natural way of solving problems, everything from fixing a Lego model to fixing university, to planning a trip,
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Our natural tendency is to fix things by adding more and more complexity.
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It s just the way our brains are.
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It s probably got some evolutionary basis that the people who gathered all that extra food are the ones who survived.
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That s our gene pool, not the ones who didn t store things for the winter and so forth.
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And then our organizations have all these incentives for people who add stuff.
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So if you started a new program, if you have a bigger team that works for you, if you add new software, we re talking about that.
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Those are all things that people tend to get rewarded for.
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And the people who don t add stuff in the first place or the people who subtract stuff are the ones who are unnoticed.
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That s the bad news.
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The good news is that there s a lot of things that happen in organizations that actually can reverse this, and we have a whole bunch of different methods that lead to subtraction.
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For us, the headline is, to start with, to steal a line from our pal Michael Deering of Venture Capitalists, the best leaders think of themselves as editors-in-chief.
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They re always thinking about, what can I get rid of?
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What can I improve?
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So this idea of what great film editors do, in some organizations, and you re talking about Ryan Holmes as an example, but in some organizations, what you have are people whose job it is to be the subtraction specialists.
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the people whose job it is to make sure that things get subtracted.
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And we do talk about AstraZeneca, one of the case studies that we did.
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They had a whole group whose job, they were a simplification group in New Jersey to spread simplification and subtraction throughout the company, both top-down and bottom-up changes.
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But top-down change would be to streamline and standardize what happens to people the first week when they re in the company, because the onboarding
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At AstraZeneca, sometimes you d get there and you d have no computer and no access to the internet for two or three weeks.
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That s a source of inefficiency and also frustration.
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And also bottom up things like eliminating meetings, combining processes and so forth.
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According to them, they saved about two million hours as a result of these changes.
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But to us, it s this idea that would be a subtraction specialist.
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team.
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It s also the mindset that runs throughout the company, too, that I think is really important to have people to be aware of the importance of subtraction and not adding stuff, as opposed to adding.
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And just two companies that come to mind, well, they re different, but they re competitors.
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One is Amazon.
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Bezos, very disciplined about not adding extra cost, extra complexity, unless it s absolutely necessary.
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And the company that I really admire, and I can t believe I m saying this at this point, but Walmart,
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Their discipline about removing excessive complexity or not adding in the first place is remarkable.
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So I was talking to Donna Morris.
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She s the CHRO of Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States.
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And just recently, she said there s only eight levels between store managers and the CEO.
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And for a company that big, I think right now at Facebook or Meta it s called, I think there s 11 levels or 12 levels.
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And it s just a tiny company in terms of number of employees compared to Walmart.
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And you probably know a lot more about Walmart than I do, because definitely they were a retail giant you want to study.
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But the discipline at Walmart, and I think they ve also gotten more humane in recent years too.
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I think they re being more caring about their frontline workers and also climate effects too in recent years.
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But they re a company that I really admire in lots of ways and they scare me a little bit because they re like a machine.
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So those are some of the things that we think of in terms of that discipline.
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Bob, the last thing I wanted to ask you, and I was hoping you could give a real quick answer on it, is what advice would you give to emerging leaders on how to manage and anticipate friction in their future roles?
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Ooh, so I do two pieces of advice.
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One is that friction is often an orphan problem.
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It s one of those things that we tend to point fingers and say it s everybody else s job but ours.
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And in the organizations that we see, and this is this notion of accountability, it s that feeling that I own the place and the place owns me.
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In organizations where friction is fixed, and I talked about the California Department of Motor Vehicles as an example, there s situations where everybody takes it upon themselves.
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to try to make things, if we re talking about getting rid of bad friction, as easy as possible within their cone of friction.
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Having a good understanding of the impacts that you intentionally and unintentionally have.
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And then the second bit of advice that I guess that I would give, and this is how we end the book, we quote Clara Shai.
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She s the CEO of AI at Salesforce now.
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And it s this notion that when you re helping people travel through a difficult period, where there s frustration, where there s difficulty, where things go wrong that are unexpected, that this notion that organizational life is going to be messy is something in some ways
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that you need to accept and to help people accept.
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And life is not going to be beautiful and easy all the time.
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So you ve got to simultaneously do two things.
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One is to acknowledge people s pain and to let them know that things being messed up is normal.
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And at the same time, guide them to fix it.
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And Clara had this great notion of separation of concerns, which is from computer science.
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And she said when she does a launch,
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She s got the kind of team, the folks whose job it is to keep the schedule going and to operate under the assumption that things are going right.
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And then she doesn t call them this, but then she s got the cleanup on aisle nine team.
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And those are the folks who are ready for things to go wrong.
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And I like that idea of separation of concerns.
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But as I always say to my students, having taught at Stanford for 40 years, if you can find an organization or a job that s beautiful and perfect, you might read a book about an organization like, well,
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Creativity Incorporated.
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I ve actually got Ed Catmull s book right here.
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I love Ed Catmull s book.
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For your audience, this might be the best business book ever written.
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And Ed did amazing things at Pixar.
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One of the reasons they re struggling now is because Ed has left, but I still remember going to Pixar after that book came out, a book that I helped Ed with the structure and I endorsed and everything.
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And somebody said to me, oh, that sounds like a great company.
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I wish I worked there.
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most pics are.
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It s like its highlight.
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So I always say to my students that if you think the grass is going to be greener sometimes in other places, very often the grass is browner.
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So you re not going to ever find the perfect organizations.
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I guess it s a duality that is important for leaders.
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The best leaders try to guide people to clean up at the mess, but they also help them get through the sort of emotionally difficult part because it s always going to be that way.
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So it s both and thinking.
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Well, yeah, both and yes.
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Well, that s like Marianne Lewis.
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There you go.
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Well, Bob, thank you so much for being on the show.
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It was such an honor to have you.
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And congratulations on the launch of this great new book.
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Well, thanks so much.
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And congratulations on the launch of your great new book.
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We re going at the same time.
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So I m excited your book is done too.
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We re out.
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Me as well.
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Well, thank you again.
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Bye bye, John.
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John or miles, our main channel and passion struck clips, please go check them out.
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I m at John or miles on all the social platforms, and you can sign up on LinkedIn for our worked related newsletter titled work intentionally.
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You re about to hear a preview of the passion struck podcast interview that I did with Dr.
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Marie-Hélène Pelletier, who s an award-winning mental health expert.
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Drawing on her extensive experience in clinical psychology, Dr. Pelletier challenges the common misperceptions of resilience.
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Her upcoming book, The Resilience Plan, offers
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a transformative roadmap for professionals to develop resilience.
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Most of us, especially for high achievers, we tend to think we re right, that our thoughts are actually pretty good.
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And a lot of the time they are, however, some of the time they may not be.
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And if we develop tools to be able to check in with our thinking, identify when it s actually not that helpful, then it is an opportunity that is entirely in our hands to optimize.
6
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Remember that we rise by lifting others.
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So share the show with those that you love and care about.
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And if you know someone who could use the inspiration on how to overcome friction that we shared today, then definitely share this episode with them.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen now.
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Go out there and become Passion Strong.