Part organizational design. Part therapy. Organizational psychologist and Stanford Professor Bob Sutton is back to tackle friction, the phenomenon that frustrates employees, fatigues teams and causes organizations to flounder and fail. Loaded with raw stories of time pressure, courage under ridiculous odds and emotional processing, FRICTION distills research insights and practical tactics to improve the way we work. Listen up as we take you into the friction and velocity of producing made-for-TV movies, scaling up design thinking, leading through crisis and more. Guests include Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame, and restaurateurs Craig and Annie Stoll; as well as academic leaders from Stanford University and beyond. FRICTION is a Stanford eCorner original series.
For our final full episode, Stanford Engineering’s Bob Sutton sits down with Kim Scott, author of the New York Times bestseller “Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.” Before a live audience in San Francisco, they discuss how we can all develop the courage to tell co-workers when they can do better, as well as face critical feedback ourselves. Do you pull punches just because you want to be liked, or fear you’ll make someone else angry? Multiply that over an entire organization, and you have the sort of ubiquitous friction that’s devilishly invisible but disastrous overall. As Scott says, the goal is to both care personally and challenge directly: “We totally forget that our humanity is an asset, and we should bring it to bear at work.”
