EDITOR-IN-CHIEF That’s How Friction Fighters Think of Themselves

In my Friction Podcast, venture capitalist and veteran executive Michael Dearing says that he teaches founders to think of themselves as “editor-in-chief” of their companies.  As Michael explains in the third episode (released yesterday), he believes that every leader and leadership team ought to be devoted to increasing “velocity” by narrowing their company’s strategy as much as possible, eliminating distracting or unnecessary products and services, and removing “blockers” that stall and slow progress (including people, processes, and politics that add make things slower or harder to do than is necessary).

The blockers that Michael and other Friction Podcast guests have suggested removing include: stubborn, incompetent, and lazy people; recurring political squabbles that waste time and breed cynicism and apathy; burdensome procedures that provoke frustration, fatigue, and disdain among employees and customers; and well-worn and useless rituals and routines. 

I was taken with Michaels’s term “editor-in-chief,” in part, because of my 30 years or so working as a writer, reviewer, and editor. And, as I thought about what Huggy Rao and I are learning from our ongoing Friction Project, especially from the podcasts, I realized that adept friction fighters in organizations think and behave much like skilled text and film editors. Regardless of the medium, a good editor is relentless about eliminating or repairing elements that distract, frustrate, bore, bewilder, or exhaust people. 

As the famous author Ernest Hemingway put it:

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."

Organizational friction fighters have a similar gift and use it to edit out impediments to decision-making and action. In the first episode of the podcast, Huggy Rao relays how, when Laszlo Bock headed People Operations at Google, he edited out a time-consuming company tradition. Bock and his colleagues realized that the long-standing Google practice of conducting seemingly endless rounds of interviews with job candidates before giving them an offer (or not) was wasting thousands of hours of employee time each year, and worse still, was so frustrating that it sometimes drove top candidates to take jobs with competitors instead of Google. Candidates for engineering or project management positions, for example, were routinely subjected to a gauntlet of 14 or 15 interviews before a hiring decision was made. 

This old Google practice might have been useful for imprinting the company culture in the early years: Google focused on hiring people who not only had the best technical skills, but who fit with their quirky culture and had the leadership skills to grow with the company. I first heard about their endless rounds of interviews in 2002 from CEO and co-founder Larry Page --who reported that he was making a lot of enemies among Stanford Computer Science students, and people they were considering from other companies, because they interviewed people so many times and turned down people with such strong technical skills; but he believed that cultural fit and leadership potential were so important that spending all that time and driving so many candidates crazy was crucial to building the kind of company he wanted. 

Yet as Google grew into a mature company, this practice had devolved into a sacred cow that was still worshipped--even if though it was no longer necessary for most job searches and was driving away top candidates. So Laszlo added a simple rule: If more than four interviews were to be conducted with a candidate, the request had to be sent to him and he had to personally grant an exception to the policy. This rule sent a clear message that the old sacred cow was dead. And most Googlers were hesitant to ask an Executive Vice-President like Laszlo for an exception. So the interview gauntlet quickly became a thing of the past.

Laszlo's editorial decision reveals two lessons for friction fighters.  First, as Huggy points out in our Podcast, you can sometimes fight friction with friction. Laszlo used constructive friction (the new rule) to make it more difficult for destructive friction to persist.  Second, rituals, routines, and even organizational strategies can become such ingrained habits that, even though people don’t where they came from or what the original logic was for using them, they persist long after outliving their usefulness.  These old habits endure, in part, because the associated familiarity and predictability provide comfort to insiders.

The New Yorker cartoon that kicks-off this piece does a lovely job of capturing this syndrome (I purchased the rights to it years ago). Those guys are wearing those stupid hats because everyone else does it and has always done it – they could use an editor like Laszlo Bock.

In the second Friction Podcast with Patty McCord, the notion that leaders serve as “editor-in-chief” emerges again and again – even though she never uses the term.    Patty describes how, when CEO Reid Hastings approached her to join Netflix as Chief Talent Officer in the early days (they had only about 30 employees), while she thought the business model was suspect, she couldn’t resist the chance to build a “no Bozos and no assholes” culture.

For the next 14 years, Patty helped build an organization that “edited out” employees who lacked top-notch skills or were selfish and mean-spirited (even if they had superstar technical talents).  Patty and her colleagues were dogged about screening out such employees during the recruiting and hiring process. They believed that Bozos and assholes undermined others’ performance, created coordination problems, and their antics distracted colleagues from their work.

I have thought a lot about destructive assholes and the virtues of “editing them out” of organizations. The “delete” button on the cover of the The No Asshole Rule makes this point in a rather blunt way. And in the sixth episode of the Friction Podcast, Rachel Julkowski and I discuss how petty tyrants and other workplace assholes can create friction, frustration, and fatigue – and how to deal with them. I hadn’t thought as much about people who lack the requisite skills or motivation to do a job – that is what Patty means by a “Bozo.” In Patty's view, likeable Bozos are especially problematic.  She explains that sometimes that most expensive and destructive employees are beloved characters who no longer have (or never had) skills the company needs. As she explained, these are the people that you keep giving less and less responsibility to, who don't have much to do so they spend their days gossiping and socializing, or worse yet, screw up their jobs day after day in ways that undermine their colleagues' work and company performance.   

Netflix sends such people packing a lot faster than most companies do (they have no performance improvement plan)– but gives them generous severance packages, helps them find jobs suited to their talents, and treats them with dignity in the process. Patty believes that “editing out” loveable (and not-so-loveable) bozos, and assholes too, has been crucial to Netflix’s growth and renowned ability to make fundamental changes in its business model.

Michael Dearing contends the CEO’s “editor-in-chief” role is especially crucial for determining and communicating an organization’s strategy.  One of the most disciplined strategy “editors” I’ve met is CEO Jeff Booth of BuildDirect, a fast-growing online seller of flooring, building materials, and other big and heavy stuff for home improvement projects.  Back in 2014, I visited BuildDirect at their headquarters in Vancouver, Canada and then worked with Rebecca Hinds to write about the company for Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn (Rebecca stars in Episode Five of the Friction Podcast; she has intriguing ideas about the links between intentional and unintentional sabotage and organizational friction). 

In the podcast, Rebecca and I also discuss the LinkedIn piece on how Jeff and his team used what they called “the five rocks” method to maintain and communicate strategic focus (which was inspired Steven Covey’s writings). Every sixty days, Booth and his senior team announced their latest five top strategic priorities to the firm.  They updated their priorities after talking to employees, customers, and investors—which were displayed in a fishbowl in a prominent place. The fishbowl was filled with five rocks, each representing one of the current priorities. As Booth explained,

Once we make the decision for the five rocks, right or wrong, we’re going to live them for the next 60 days.” Booth emphasized that, by sticking to just five priorities (or rocks) at a time, it forces him and his team to stay focused on what matters most. And their review every 60 days forces regular and mindful editing of their strategy because, to create space for a new rock, they must remove an old one.  

The five rocks method intrigues me because, in his role as editor-in-chief, Booth is taking steps to avoid scattering his people’s attention and relieve their cognitive load.  As this LinkedIn piece explains, this method can avoid overtaxing employees “working memory” and the resulting “blind spots and bad decisions” that sap people's willpower. The five rocks method is also interesting given a classic 1956 research paper by psychologist George Miller called “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.”  Miller asserts that seven is a “magical number” because people could only hold “seven, plus or minus two” numbers or other bits of information in short-term memory at once. Miller’s assertions about the precise limits of human memory have been questioned by other researchers over the years. But the five rocks strategy is consistent with decades of research that show, when people are expected to do many things at once, they do all or most of those things badly.

Huggy Rao and I are in the early stages of the Friction Project. I don’t know if this editor-in-chief analogy will prove to be useful in the end. But it does help us understand key themes in in every Friction Podcast, it turns attention to the practical implications of the case studies and academic articles that we read on friction, and helps us focus on what friction fighters do and ought to do when we they practice their craft. 

So, for now, my hunch is that it helps all friction fighters to think of themselves as editors and for senior executives to think of themselves as editors in chief. Please let me know what you think of this hunch, how to develop it further, and the strengths and weaknesses of tackling organizational friction from this perspective.

P.S. Please consider leave a rating and perhaps review of the Friction Podcast on iTunes. The Stanford STVP team tells me that such ratings help increase the impact and visibility.

I am a Stanford Professor who studies and writes about leadership, organizational change, and navigating organizational life. Check out my new"All Things Bob Sutton" site, which includes a place to sign up for a free monthly newsletter, videos, and links to my other work. Follow me on Twitter@work_matters, and see my other posts on LinkedIn. My most recent book (with Huggy Rao) is Scaling Up Excellence. My next book, The Asshole Survival Guide: How To Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt, will be published in Fall of 2017. 

Note this post is based on a piece that first appeared in my June 2017 newsletter.