I think Bruce is on to something, that if you want creativity and learning, command and control is bad. BUT I think his argument is right, but incomplete.  The fact is that close managerial oversight and constant criticism and feedback aren't the only ways to drive down cost and increase quality.  In fact, these systems work best when employees have lots of data about cost and quality AND they police themselves rather than are policed by some boss.  That is part of the secret sauce of the Toyota Production system and of places like Southwest Airlines, Men's Wearhouse, and DaVita -- which runs hundreds of kidney dialysis centers at low cost while delivering the best quality in the business. It is also what I saw when I visited SuccessFactors a few weeks ago -- not close supervision but people who worked to please and impress their co-workers and because they took pride in doing a good job -- in fact these norms were so strong that rank and file employees felt safe about pressuring senior management to do their jobs better and senior management felt obligated to respond! 

My message is that a numbers-based and quality focused organization need not be top down, where bosses use numbers to lord over and push around their underlings. In fact, to the extent that there is a peer culture that presses people to do the right thing and that has the right information, you don't need to waste money on managers who watch people do the work -- rather than doing it themselves.(I would love to see the numbers about the cost of management and supervision under Nardelli's leadership -- his salary alone drove these numbers way-up and paying all those people to do command and control must cost a lot of money).

So I agree with Bruce for the most part, but want to emphasize that command and control does not equal lower cost and higher quality. Systems that run on peer control and great measures will be more efficient than those that depend on close managerial oversight-- and in fact have higher quality, because it is one thing to fool a boss who comes by once in awhile, but fooling your peers every minute of the day is a lot harder.

Finally, I don't think that Nardelli's reputation for arrogance helped him keep his job and -- although I have no inside information to confirm this-- I hope that another reason he was shown the door so abruptly was that the board decided to enforce the no asshole rule. Perhaps that is just my little dream, but I do think that when leaders are known as assholes AND their organization has performance problems, people lose their jobs a lot more quickly than when they are warm and well-liked leaders.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School, where he studies the links between managerial knowledge and organizational action, innovation, and organizational performance.  He has authored several books including most recently (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management” (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). His next book, “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t¸” will be published by Warner in early 2007.  He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  

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