Bob Sutton

Stanford University

I served as a tenure track professor at Stanford for 40+years, tenured for 34 years. In my new role, I continue write and learn from my Stanford colleagues, work with Stanford students, and teach both Stanford students and executives. And I help a bit with administrative stuff.  But I am more focused on work with people and organizations outside of my Stanford department.

Professor Emeritus of Management Science & Engineering

Tenure-track faculty member at Stanford for 40+ years.  Untenured assistant professor from 1983 to 1989. Tenured associate professor from 1989 to 1992.  Tenured full professor from 1992 to 2023. Professor Emeritus (in Management Science & Engineering) from 2024 to present.

Professor

St. Martin's Press

I am a New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including The No Asshole Rule, The Knowing Doing Gap (with Jeff Pfeffer), Scaling Up Excellence (with Huggy Rao), and Good Boss, Bad Boss. My new book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Easier and the Wrong Things Harder (with Huggy Rao), which published in January of 2024. Note only only The Friction Project was published by St. Martins.  My other books were published by other houses. I have also written perhaps 200 articles for media outlets including Harvard Business Review, Washington Post,New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and LinkedIn and academic journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Journal of Applied Psychology.

Author

United Talent Agency

I do keynote speeches, especially on my books The Friction Project and Scaling Up Excellence, and the related topics on leading at scale and the fundamentals of modern leadership. Here's my speakers page https://www.utaspeakers.com/speaker/bob-sutton

Keynote Speaker

Stanford, Center For Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

My role as a faculty fellow is to help and learn from residential fellows, to support the operation and external impact of work done at CASBS, and more broadly to do the small things I can to help behavioral science knowledge have a positive impact on practice and policy.  I have been connected to this wonderful "think tank" for some 35 years. I first served as a residential fellow in the 1986-87 academic year.  And then in the 1994-95 and 2002-03 academic years.

Faculty Fellow

Work Innovation Lab

Advisor

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford ( d.school )

I helped David Kelley as a co-founder of the d.school and have been teaching Stanford students and executives at the d.school since we were housed in a double-wide trailer on the Stanford campus.

the d.school

Teamraderie

IDEO

Fellow

Robert Sutton is an organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author.  He is author of eight books, including (with Huggy Rao) "The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder." He studies leadership, organizational change, innovation, scaling, and workplace dynamics. At Stanford, he is Professor of Management Science and Engineering (emeritus) and a faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He co-founded the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Institute of Design (“the d school”), and Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. 

Sutton speaks on friction in organizations, other challenges of leading at scale, and fundamentals of modern leadership. To book him, contact Charlotte Perman at United Talent Agency at perman_c@unitedtalent.com or 212.647.6307. 

Sutton won the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching, and numerous other Stanford teaching awards.  He won awards for the best paper of the year in the Academy of Management Journal and in the Academy of Management Review.  Sutton was named as one of 10 “B-School All-Stars” by BusinessWeek, “professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond academia.” The London Business School honored him with the Sumantra Ghoshal Award for Rigour and Relevance in the Study of Management. 

Sutton has published over 200 articles in academic and popular outlets.  His books include"Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense" (with Jeff Pfeffer),  selected by the Toronto Globe and Mail as the best business book of 2006. "The Knowing-Doing Gap" (with Pfeffer) was chosen for Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s "100 Best Business Books of All Time."  Fast Company's Bill Taylor described "Weird Ideas That Work" as "the smartest and most original take on leadership and organizational creativity that I’ve read." Sutton's "Good Boss, Bad Boss" and "The No Asshole Rule" are New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. Scaling-Up Excellence (with Rao) is a Wall Street Journal bestseller and Financial Times picked it as among the best six management books in 2014. 

On "The Friction Project," Adam Grant wrote: “This is the ultimate guide to diagnosing and fixing the problems in your organization. No one knows more about making work better than this pair of experts, and they’ve produced a remarkably insightful, engrossing, evidence-based, and actionable read. If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.”

My daughter, now a veteran of corporate America's twisted ways, sent me this graphic.  Alas, all too often, it captures the ugly truth. It doesn't need to be this way. Check out Rebecca Hinds, PhD's forthcoming "Your Best Meeting Ever" to avoid, revamp, and eliminate those oh-so-painful meetings. 

https://lnkd.in/gQkrT6-D

Organizational psychologist, Stanford faculty, New York Times bestselling author, and speaker. Eight books including Good Boss, Bad Boss, The No Asshole Rule, and Scaling Up Excellence. Latest:The Friction Project.

A big thanks to the Thinkers50 folks for inducting me into their Hall of Fame. I am honored to join so many people I admire including Teresa Amabile, Marshall Goldsmith, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Dave Ulrich, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and the late Warren Bennis. And it makes me think of some of my greatest mentors I had as a young academic. Notably my warm and wicked smart dissertation advisor, Robert L. Kahn, the irreverent J. Richard Hackman (who always told me the ugly truths about myself), and Mayer Zald (Caring and a brillant sociologist, and funny as hell). All gone now. A bit about each:

https://lnkd.in/gRcB9KRF
https://lnkd.in/geGNR_cE
https://lnkd.in/gKcGhvtJ 

The obit for Mayer Zald, which is titled "A Mensch Ahead of His Time," is perfectly titled.

Honouring the enduring influence of Bob Sutton, we induct him into the #Thinkers50 Hall of Fame.

Bob is an organisational psychologist and emeritus professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University School of Engineering, where he researches leadership, innovation, organisational change, and workplace dynamics, especially at scale. He is also the co-founder and former co-director of the Stanford Center For Work Technology co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), and co-founder of the Stanford d.school. He has authored and co-authored several award-winning books, and his more than 200 articles, chapters, and case studies have been featured in multiple recognised academic and media outlets.

To learn more about Bob’s relentless mission to make work better for everyone, visit our website: https://lnkd.in/dqJTPhj

#HallofFame #Business #Management #Leadership #Innovation

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I had to laugh when I read The Economist's hypocritical Bartleby column on "Why Bosses Need to Wake Up to Dark Patterns," which is "the term for user interfaces which nudge or manipulate consumers into making choices they otherwise wouldn’t." One example Bartleby's gives of a dark pattern is "The cancellation journey so byzantine that people forget what it was they were trying to do."  These are also called "roach motels," because you can check in but can’t check out.  

Whomever writes Bartleby (apparently Andrew Palmer) needs to show the column to his bosses.  I hesitated to renew my Economist subscription for years because, when I ended it some years back, I had to interact with a human online (this was before AI was prevalent, so I think it was a person) and, while I kept repeating I wanted to end my subscription NOW, the "person" wouldn't do it, and kept offering me another deal, kept telling me I would regret it, and so on.  This went on for at least 10 iterations before I was allowed to do so. 

I was pissed.  Thinking about it still makes my blood boil. And it was the kind of frustrating experience that led "Huggy" Hayagreeva Rao and I to write "The Friction Project"--where we show the best leaders and organizations are "trustees of others' time." That ain't how"The Economist" treated me, despite Bartleby's railing against such corporate slime. 

It seems that many others have struggled to check out of The Economist's frustrating and oppressive roach motel. Note this AI result from Google:

"Yes, ending an Economist subscription can be difficult and is often a frustrating process that requires you to use live chat or call their service center, where you may face high-pressure sales tactics. While some users report being able to cancel online through their account, many have had to endure long chats with agents who try to persuade them to keep the subscription. "

Note that cancelling the Economist (and other subscriptions) may have become easier for some subscribers in the U.S. because some states, including California, have passed laws in recent years that ban roach motels and other dark patterns. See this recent consumer alert from California's attorney general: https://lnkd.in/gp2XS4h9

https://lnkd.in/g4Rsucxy

Open article: Why bosses need to wake up to dark patterns by economist.com

Illustration of a businessman arching his back to avoid being poked by a pointing finger cursor

Why bosses need to wake up to dark patterns

As I wade through all the noisy data about AI, the absurd claims, and ideological battles between believers and cynics, this new Harvard Business Review piece is among the most sensible and carefully researched articles I've have read.  It is evidence-based, filled with concrete examples of AI experiments in places like Google and Procter & Gamble, and I especially loved this measured antidote to the quest for instant gratification that infects so many AI hucksters and victims of AI hurry-sickness out there:

"For a historical parallel, think about electricity: Manufacturing plants took almost 40 years to adapt to the technology and optimize themselves around it, according to the late economic historian Paul David."

I also liked the range of skills among the five authors on the paper--three academics (in different fields, it seems, two from Harvard Business School and one from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and two executives from Siemens.

Open article: A Systematic Approach to Experimenting with Gen AI by hbr.org

A Systematic Approach to Experimenting with Gen AI

I am reading a remarkable well-researched report "The Agentic State"  which outlines "Rethinking Government for the Era of Agentic AI." See www.agenticstate.org/

It is convincing and well-crafted. Yet, while I'm an AI optimist, I am not as optimistic as the authors!  

Two things bugged me about it. First, the authors imply that faster AI implementation is pretty much always better. There is constant reference to "the urgency of acting now," "why governments can't afford to lag," and "the costs of being late." I am not advocating inaction or dithering.  But--as Huggy Hayagreeva Rao and I document in "The Friction Project-- I worry the authors don't acknowledge how focusing on moving faster and faster is mighty dangerous. People and organizations fixated on speed are prone to underestimate necessary complexity, cut corners, treat others in nasty and inhumane ways, and do unethical things.  

I am all for fast, effective, and humane change.  Yet, much like race car drivers, systemic change requires knowing when to hit the gas and hit the brakes, when it is time for a pit stop, and when it is time to quit because your car is broken or  burning. Pedal to the metal all the time doesn't work in racing or organizational change. 

Second, in my other conversations and research, I see evidence of ways AI is breaking down boundaries between silos and creating less reliance on hierarchy.  Yet I am always wary of claims that any new solution will eliminate or massively reduce the need for top down leadership and hierarchy.  I keep hearing this claim about AI and I see it in the claims in the report on "Hierarchical Authority vs. Network Coordination." That, "Agentic systems operate through networks of specialised agents coordinating across organisational boundaries. Traditional hierarchies cannot provide the real-time oversight and coordination these systems require." 

Perhaps. But I have heard similar claims about "the big new thing" for 40+ years. That, because of some breakthrough, hierarchies are now obsolete (or will become much flatter), and organizations will rely more on bottom-up or network processes. Including for job design, agile, design thinking, democratizing work, Holacracy, and by Peter Drucker too.  

Yet hierarchies persist, barely changed. Every AI company I know is organized (at least in large part) into a top-down hierarchy, as is every AI project I know.  Hierarchy remains essential to decision-making and coordination in every organization I know, no matter how much they use AI.  And, ironically, the implementation speed the authors of this report demand of governments won't happen without a deluge of top down support, decisions, and directives from government leaders.

Following Lindy Greer's research on"flexing" the hierarchy, a better question in this AI era might be, given these remarkable tools, when is it best to "activate" vs "flatten" vs. "ignore" the hierarchy?  

Again, I am focusing on nits. It is an excellent report.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, where he co-founded the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and Institute of Design (“the d school”). He studies leadership, organizational change, innovation, scaling, and workplace dynamics. His next book (with Huggy Rao) is "The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder" will be published in early 2024.

Sutton does speeches and workshops on friction, along with other challenges of leading at scale, and the fundamentals of modern leadership.  To book him, contact Charlotte Perman at United Talent Agency at perman_c@unitedtalent.com or 212.647.6307. 

Sutton won the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching, and numerous other Stanford teaching awards.  He won awards for the best paper of the year in the Academy of Management Journal and in the Academy of Management Review.  Sutton was also named as one of 10 “B-School All-Stars” by BusinessWeek, “professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond academia.” The London Business School honored him with the Sumantra Ghoshal Award for Rigour and Relevance in the Study of Management. 

Sutton has published over 200 articles in academic and popular outlets, along with seven books. "Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense" (with Jeff Pfeffer) was selected by the Toronto Globe and Mail as the best business book of 2006. "The Knowing-Doing Gap" (with Pfeffer) was chosen for Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s "100 Best Business Books of All Time."  Fast Company co-founder Bill Taylor described "Weird Ideas That Work" as "the smartest and most original take on leadership and organizational creativity that I’ve read." Sutton's "Good Boss, Bad Boss" and "The No Asshole Rule" are New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. Scaling-Up Excellence (with Rao) is a Wall Street Journal bestseller and Financial Times picked it as among the best six management books in 2014. "The Asshole Survival Guide" was praised by outlets including The Washington Post, Financial Times, and Vox. 

After reading Sutton's next book, "The Friction Project," Adam Grant wrote: “This is the ultimate guide to diagnosing and fixing the problems in your organization. No one knows more about making work better than this pair of experts, and they’ve produced a remarkably insightful, engrossing, evidence-based, and actionable read. If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.”

agenticstate.org

The Agentic State

Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Faculty Partner, Mach49.com

Professor of Management & Faculty Director Sanger Leadership Center at University of Michigan - Ross School of Business

Jonathan Feldman

I just read an advance copy and wrote a blurb for Rebecca Hinds, PhD's fantastic forthcoming book, "Your Best Meeting Ever." It's packed with great stories and studies, useful solutions, and Rebecca has a compelling "writing voice." 

Here's one gem that rings true (and gives me flashbacks to some awful meetings in academia over the years--where the same person organized it AND did all the talking):

"Who leaves the meeting feeling most satisfied? Research by Steven Rogelberg shows it’s usually one of two people:

THE MEETING ORGANIZER: They checked a box and felt productive,
even if nothing was accomplished.

THE PERSON WHO TALKED THE MOST: They basked in the sound of
their own voice echoing across the room, even if they didn’t
say anything useful. "

amazon.com

Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done

Head of the Work AI Institute and Thought Leadership at Glean | Author of Your Best Meeting Ever (Simon & Schuster, Feb 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Columnist at Inc. and Reworked

“Customers don’t care if it’s AI-enabled or not,” Chanes said in an interview at the #FortuneMPW Summit. “I think customers just want to have the best experience possible.” 

Obvious? In this era of AI hype, I often think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's argument that the best leaders and companies are "masters of the obvious" yet "such common sense is uncommon."  This is from books wrote together, but he wrote this (wise) stuff, not me!

Nubank Brazil CEO Livia Chanes isn’t interested in building an “AI bank.” She’s building a bank that works, and she believes that distinction matters more now than ever.

“Customers don’t care if it’s AI-enabled or not,” Chanes said in an interview at the #FortuneMPW Summit. “I think customers just want to have the best experience possible.”

At a time when CEOs across industries are rebranding products as “AI-powered” to meet investor expectations, Chanes’s stance is a differentiator, and Nubank is in a strong position to challenge conventional wisdom.

It is now the largest digital bank in the world by number of customers, with more than 120 million users across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, and a market value of roughly $50 billion, larger than many U.S. regional banks. Its growth has come not from hype cycles, but from eliminating friction.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/eCrVdtMd

Open article: $50B fintech CEO says stop selling AI. Customers don’t care and ‘just want their problem solved’ | Fortune by fortune.com

$50B fintech CEO says stop selling AI. Customers don’t care and ‘just want their problem solved’ | Fortune

How does the job candidate treat the receptionist?  An "asshole detection test" used by my pal Jessica Neal when she was the top HR leader Netflix.  More broadly,  as I wrote in "The No Asshole Rule," "the difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know."

Helping lawyers to develop and sustain authentic relationships that drive growth |Optimist

Brillant compact summary of the trouble with authenticity.  The upshot: The people most likely to act like their true selves are the people we don’t want to be around! Like the assholes who claim they are “just being myself.”

Author: Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead; I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique; and Why so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (and how to fix it)

View Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s profile

There is an interesting relationship between emotional intelligence (#EQ) and #authenticity 

It goes like this…

1) the higher your EQ, the more you can afford to “just be yourself” (because doing so will likely not make other people suffer)

2) if your EQ is low, your authenticity will be rather taxing and annoying to others… (not least because you are less likely to notice/care about it)

3) and yet, empirical evidence indicates that high EQ people make a great deal of effort to not be themselves: indeed, EQ is basically interchangeable with impression management (if this fact annoys you, you may not be a high EQ scorer)

4) Oscar Wilde put it best: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go” (the former have high EQ, the latter are just being themselves) 

to find out more… you know where to go! 

#DBY

I am honored (and excited like a little kid) about the "fireside chat" I am having  about scaling this afternoon with Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice-President.  And  to meet the leaders attending the Generation Investment Management gathering in San Francisco's magical Presidio National Park today.   To get ready for our chat, I talked to a number of folks who know Al Gore well.  The main theme that runs through their comments is, unlike many politicians, he is a warm and nice human, and has a sense of humor.  Sounds good to me.

View company: Generation Investment Management

Today our Growth Equity team's System Positive Summit will bring together more than 150 leaders to discuss the challenges, opportunities and solutions in scaling mission-driven, high-growth companies.   
 
Founders, investors and sustainability leaders are taking part in the event in San Francisco, with sessions featuring our portfolio companies and advisors. 
 
What’s on the agenda? 

💡 1:15-1:25pm: Welcome from Lila Preston, Generation’s Head of Growth Equity 
💡 1:25-2pm: Fireside chat with Generation Chairman Al Gore  
💡 2-2:35pm: Panel session: Go-to-market strategies for scaling sustainably beyond $100 million 
💡 3-3:35pm: Panel session: Building effective boards 
💡 3:40-4:15pm: Panel session: Harnessing AI as a driver of sustainable growth 
💡 4:30-5:15pm: Fireside chat with Al Gore and Professor Bob Sutton, organisational psychologist, best-selling author and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University
  
System Positive is our shorthand for companies that we believe will help drive the transition to a sustainable world in which prosperity is shared broadly, in a society that achieves wellbeing for all, protects nature and preserves a habitable climate. 🌎 
 
Discover more about our Growth Equity team’s approach at https://lnkd.in/eK8m_4dq

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Bob Sutton's Linkedin Analytics

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Bob Sutton's Best Posts (last 30 days)