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.
As kids, it worked every time: Out of sheer greed, you claim the last Oreo by licking it and grossing out all your friends. As adults, it’s your colleague who tells everyone he plans to work on something just so no one else does - halting productivity and progress. In this episode, Stanford Engineering Professor Bob Sutton and his co-conspirator Rebecca Hinds crack open a recently declassified World War II field manual for undercover saboteurs, drawing parallels to the ways businesses undermine themselves and competitors. Whether it’s a pre-meeting before a meeting, or hitting “reply all” in an email, these little acts gunk things up as badly as a fistful of rice in a Humvee’s fuel tank.
