Bob Sutton is a professor at Stanford Engineering School and an active member of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. And he knows how to spot an asshole. You might even say he wrote the book on the subject, because he did.
We had a chance to work with Bob and Guy Kawasaki building the ARSE (Asshole Rating Self Exam.) The exam is a short series of questions resulting in a score to tell you how bigga jerk you really are. (With 66,500 completions, the average score is 5.2 or borderline asshole.)
We’re working with Bob again to try to take the efforts further. We’ve just launched ArseMail to help Bob market his book “The No Asshole Rule.” The site lets you send email of two flavors: condolence (sorry you work with an asshole,) or apology (sorry I was an asshole.) The original plan was a little more direct (someone thinks you’re an asshole,) but we’re hoping the effect is just as strong without causing headaches for the publisher.
If you know anyone dealing with an asshole, be sure to check it out.
4 Responses to “Do you work with an asshole?”
Does “Bob” give credit to Scott Adams for coming up with the “No Asshole Rule” as the prime directive for his OA5 management system?
This was the foundation of the OA5 system and was published years ago in the Dilbert Principle. In a relatively few pages, Scott paints a clear picture of why assholes ruin the workplace for everyone. OA5 would require enlightened management who are actually able to disern who is an asshole and who is not which is probably why it hasn’t become a commonly used management technique.
It is funny that Guy Kawasaki is on the project, since I consider him to be the shining example of a special type of asshole – the “I don’t contribute any real work, but always have a ton of things to say, none of which actually contains any substance” asshole.
Can’t say that Guy and I are best friends forever, but we’ve worked with him on a few projects. And an asshole is the last thing I’d say he is – I’ve heard “marketing genius” used before. You’re certainly entitled to your opinion though.
Thanks for your even-handed response about that part of my comment. It is just something about him and people like Joel [on software] where they yabber on and on but there just doesn’t seem to be any there there. But maybe its just that I am not in tune with “marketing professionals”.
One thought on the asshole survey, in terms of survey taking psychology, what about mixing up the order of the yes/no’s – good answer/bad answers so that the order is random – I haven’t checked for studies on that exact parameter but it seems like it wouldn’t hurt.
Hi Ann. You make a good point. Guy’s surveys tend to make it easy to recognize the “correct” answer (at least in the handful we’ve built for him.) It seems like that could sway the results, but he does it intentionally – I suspect he’s trying to make the point of each question more apparent.