The Friction Project with Bob Sutton

The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

Is it better to prioritize making tasks quick and easy, or should you consider making them slower and more difficult? Bob Sutton suggests smart leaders can make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. Sutton joins Kevin to discuss the challenges faced by organizations as they grow, emphasizing the importance of recognizing both good and bad friction within teams and processes. He highlights the need to balance speed and thoroughness in decision-making, using examples like Google's hiring process evolution and the impact of inefficient workflows on employee morale and productivity. He also touches on leadership approaches like "management walking out of the room" to foster collaboration and decision-making and common traps organizations fall into, such as "addition sickness," where the default solution to problems is adding complexity instead of subtracting unnecessary elements.

Meet Robert

Robert's Story: Robert I. Sutton is the co-author of The Friction Project How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder with Huggy Rao. He is an organizational psychologist and professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. He has given keynote speeches to more than 200 groups in 20 countries and served on numerous scholarly editorial boards. Sutton’s work has been featured in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and Washington Post. He is a frequent guest on various television and radio programs, and has written seven books and two edited volumes, including the bestsellers The No Asshole Rule; Good Boss, Bad Boss; and Scaling Up Excellence.

https://www.bobsutton.net/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobsutton1/

This Episode is brought to you by...

The Long-Distance Team. Remote leadership experts, Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, help leaders navigate the new world of remote and hybrid teams to design the culture they desire for their teams and organizations in their new book!

Book Recommendations

• The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao
• Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team Paperback by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai

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• Hack Your Bureaucracy with Nick Sinai

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