Book Review: The No Asshole Rule: Building A Civilized Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t
Despite the hype around this book, in part generated by Guy Kawasaki’s ~five blog posts on it, and despite my desire to be a deferential and gracious host (Professor Robert Sutton, Ph.D., the author, spoke at eBay), I must admit my disappointment with it. Perhaps my expectations were too high because Kawasaki hyped up the book and Sutton spoke at my workplace.
The basic premise — assholes in the workplace are bad for business and should be dealt with appropriately — is reasonable, but here’s why the book didn’t resonate with me:
- Availability Bias. The book presupposes the magnitude of the problem of assholes in the workplace. Naturally, the author appeals to the reader’s memories of any assholes encountered in the workplace to provide emotional support for the prevalence of the problem. These emotional memories, however, do not necessarily prove that the problem is significant. I have the opposite availability bias: I’ve been fortunate to work only at organizations with few if any assholes, so I tend to believe assholes in the workplace are the exception to the rule. (See, by the way, the Wikipedia entry on “availability heuristic” for further discussion on this cognitive bias).
- Fuzzy math. The few numbers Sutton cites to quantify the magnitude of the problem appear more as anecdotal and cursory than sound analysis. I was reminded of Steven Lewitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakanomics, except that the analysis in Freakanomics appeared rigorous, and wondered what Lewitt and Dubner might reveal in Sutton’s calculations.
While I found the diagnosis of the magnitude of the problem lengthy and un-compelling, the discussions on how to avoid being an asshole and how to deal with assholes were a quick, diverting read.
Overall, Sutton takes a titillating subject matter and pens a novel where an essay would suffice. In fact, Sutton’s short article, “Nasty People” in CIO Insight, inspired the book. The book is relatively short, but, instead of reading it, I recommend reading the synopses in Kawasaki’s posts and taking the Asshole Rating Self Exam (”ARSE”) on which Sutton and Kawasaki collaborated.
My brother Joon-Soo,
I concur. Read this book a couple weeks ago. It’s awful. It’s a bunch of basic yet disconnected observations with awful recommendations (like “avoid the assholes” which is just worthless.) There’s really nothing memorable in the book that you can do something with. The exemplar assholes are a nice lurid diversion only if you can say “Wow, I’ve never met someone THAT bad.”
Sold the book some someone poor sucker on Half who paid nearly full price. Considered myself lucky.
Yeah, I was being a bit gentle, guest that he was. Totally agree with you.