Robert I. Sutton

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

And that's really the central idea of the book and the logic of what we're trying to lay out is what does it look like to really invest in, you know, what Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao wrote a great book called The Friction Project, which I recommend to everyone on this call.

And it's a beautiful metaphor.

You know, at the beginning of we lay out a five-step process, at the beginning of the process, you're creating good friction.

books of all time.

It was written years ago by a guy named Robert Sutton, and it basically debunks the idea that if you have that technically brilliant genius that treats people like crap, that you're fine because it will destroy your company.

And so you can't be an asshole.

You just can't.

But of course, you guys have a couple other books that you've written.

Huggy, you co-authored two books with Bob Sutton, who I interviewed before about them, a book called The Friction Project, which came out, I think, just last year.

And this previous book called Scaling Up Excellence, Getting to More Without Settling for Less.

And I think that was maybe 2014 or so that that came out.

And I have to say, in the five plus years we've been doing the show, I've rarely been as excited to welcome a guest as I am today.

His name is Bob Sutton.

He's an organizational psychologist, Stanford professor, author of several influential books, including one of my favorites on workplace psychology, which is The No Asshole Rule.

Absolutely legendary book.

Terrifying kind of efficiency and value.

Yeah.

Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Sutton.

Bob, you've lived up to and exceeded my grandiose expectations.

So I wrote two other books.

Both of these were written with my dear friend, Robert Sutton, who also wrote the famous book, The No Asshole Rule.

One of the books was called The Knowing Doing Gap.

And that is the gap between what we know and what we do, which exists a lot in organizations where you hear an organization say, we know we need to do training and that we shouldn't stop and start training based on the economic cycle because it's hard to do and it's economically inefficient to stop and department, but we do it anyway.

Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes got the assignment.

In a workplace, you've got what organizational psychologist Bob Sutton calls grease people and gunk people.

When you've got the wrong middle managers in the wrong places, they can gum up the works.

Sutton, who's a professor emeritus at Stanford, says the idea with cutting management layers is you get rid of the people who slow things down and battle with others for power.

And those folks in particular have been big mentors and have been inspiring throughout my career, certainly.

So there's a lot of their influence in the book, in particular, Bob Sutton's been a massive mentor.

And I think you can read his influence in every chapter.

So just on that, I love how you start the book about poor meetings were used as a sabotage tactic in wartime.