Harvard Business Publishing

Over the last two weeks (1, 2), I've looked at some of the best ways to manage layoffs. A study by Christopher Zatzick and Rick Iverson of Simon Fraser University, published in the Academy of Management Journal last October, adds an interesting twist. They found that layoffs have the most negative effects on subsequent performance in "high involvement" workplaces. These are workplaces where employees have more decision-making authority and responsibility and greater emphasis is placed on the importance of human beings compared to traditional workplaces. As Zatzick and Iverson conclude, this finding makes sense, because when members of an organization have been treated especially humanely, given substantial authority, and persistently told how much they are valued, layoffs violate the "psychological contract" between the organization and its people. In contrast, organizations that have a history of treating employees in less humane ways and giving them less power, and then do involuntary... Keep Reading »

I concluded last week by noting that, sometimes, layoffs are unavoidable. Here's what Jeff Pfeffer and I found were the four guidelines to making them run in as humane a manner as possible. 1. Prediction: Give people as much information as you can about what will happen — to them as individuals, to their workgroups, and to the organization as a whole — and when it will happen. This makes the layoff real for people and helps them prepare for the future. 2. Understanding: Explain why you believe the change is necessary. Human beings have consistently negative reactions to unexplained events. This effect is so strong that it is better to give an explanation that people dislike than no explanation at all — so long as the explanation is credible. 3. Control: Giving people influence over what will happen is often impossible, but giving them influence over how it happens... Keep Reading »

Carol Hymowitz interviewed me for a recent Wall Street Journal column, titled "Though Now Routine, Bosses Still Stumble During the Layoff Process." The interview sparked my curiosity, and I went back and read research on "downsizing," a topic I've been interested in since I did my dissertation research on the process of organizational death in the 1980s. In doing so, some persistent themes — and one interesting twist — jumped out. For the next three weeks, I'll be examining what I've learned about whether layoffs are necessary and how best to proceed when they are. Although workforce reduction persists at a fairly high rate (especially involuntary staff reductions), the evidence that these practices actually help improve organizational performance is weak. Jeff Pfeffer and I reviewed every careful study we could find for our book on evidence-based management. We found studies showing that layoffs had no significant effects on performance. We... Keep Reading »

My last post was on learning from success and failure, and one of the main themes was that failure leads to deeper thinking and learning. There was also some hint in the studies I discussed by Shmuel Ellis and his colleagues that talking about both success and failure leads to richer learning than talking about just success or just failure. This research has essential messages for managers: They should do postmortems so that they don't make the same mistakes over and over again (one of those obvious things that few managers and companies actually do). As I thought about success and failure, I realized that there was a related and equally crucial question: What can leaders do while bad things are happening so that learning and desirable change happens in the organization? After all, bad times and crises often arise in organizations, and go on for substantial stretches, placing pressure... Keep Reading »

One of the mottoes that Diego Rodriguez and I use at the Stanford d.school is “failure sucks, but instructs.” We encourage students to learn from the constant stream of small setbacks and successes that are produced by doing things (rather than just talking about what to do). To paraphrase our d.school founder and inspiration David Kelley: “If you keep making the same mistakes again and again, you aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.” Although the concept of failing forward is widely discussed and makes sense, it has been the subject of limited academic research to date. But some cool stuff is coming out now. An especially interesting pair of studies has been published during the last couple of years in Journal of Applied Psychology by Shmuel Ellis from Tel Aviv University. There have been... Keep Reading »

An article containing some ideas from The No Asshole Rule appeared in The McKinsey Quarterly last week and was summarized in The Economist. This post is motivated by the question with which The Economist ends its little story: “If jerks cost firms so dearly, why are so many them employed?” I think that it is a good question, and one that I have puzzled over a lot. To their point: A study of American workers released in March found that 44 percent of Americans reported they have worked for an abusive boss. This study was conducted by the Reed Group for the Employment Law Alliance. They surveyed a representative sample of 1,000 American adults within the past two weeks, which resulted in interviews with 534 workers. Things are even worse in some occupations, notably medicine. A longitudinal study of nearly 3,000 medical students from 16 medical schools was just published... Keep Reading »

Guy Kawasaki is one of the most intriguing people I know in Silicon Valley. His initial fame came at Apple, where he was their all-star marketing evangelist. During the dot-com boom, he started his own venture firm. Guy didn’t do that like everyone else either. Most local VCs stay out of sight and can only be spotted having breakfast at Buck’s in Woodside or Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. Guy was the VC for the masses. He held one-day entrepreneurship boot camps. At the height of the madness, thousands of people would attend. He did other crazy things: I recall waiting for a movie at the local theatre when an ad appeared on-screen encouraging entrepreneurs to send their business plans to his company Garage Technology Ventures. Guy also wrote a few books along the way and has morphed himself, yet again, into a business blogger at How to Change the... Keep Reading »

Last week I described the ARSE Test, a 24-item "self-rating" survey taken from The No Asshole Rule, which has been completed by more than 85,000 people since we launched it on Guy Kawasaki's blog in February. I just finished a sequel to the ARSE Test, called "The Flying ARSE," complete with silly logo: This is also a 24-item self-rating test, which answers the question, "Do you make air travel miserable for everyone else." Take it at www.flyingarse.com. The Flying Arse was inspired by the stories that people told me after they read the section in The No Asshole Rule about how Southwest and JetBlue have banned persistently nasty passengers. I've had a lot of reaction to the story from Ann Rhoades about a loud and rude passenger who was hurling insults at Southwest employees. Ann was the Executive Vice-President for People at Southwest for years. When I interviewed her for... Keep Reading »

We have had a lot of positive response to my post about Gus Bitdinger's Innovation Song. So, as they say on TV: Wait, there's more! As I wrote on my other blog, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program hosted "Entrepreneurship Week" at Stanford last month, and one of the highlights was the Innovation Challenge, in which student teams used Post-it Notes as the basis for an innovation competition. Check out the link to see some of the inspiring film that resulted from this contest (especially the one with the disabled kids from Thailand), and to see the splendid project by Gus and his other team members, whatsyourpostit.com. HARVARD BUSINESS ONLINE RECOMMENDS: Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation (Hardcover) Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small (Paperback) Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, A Conversation with Robert Sutton, (CD-ROM)... Keep Reading »

Acting like a jerk is contagious. If you want to avoid turning into one, the most important thing you can do is to stay away from nasty people. You should also avoid joining nasty workplaces. If you do find yourself in one, perhaps accidentally, it's wise to get out as fast as you can. Many don’t realize that they are suffering from the affliction. They constantly demean and de-energize others. My book The No Asshole Rule includes a picture of this button to make the point: A bit more seriously, the book also includes a 24 question “self-test.” Consider a few sample items: “You sometimes just can’t contain your contempt toward the losers and jerks at your workplace.” “You were a nice person until you started working with the current bunch of creeps.” “You are constantly buttering up your boss and other powerful people, and expect the same treatment from... Keep Reading »