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Jason Yip directed me to a fantastic post about Bob Nardelli -- the deposed CEO of Home Depot that I blogged about last week-- over at Lean Blog, called "You Can't S**t on Your Employees"
Here is the quote from an employee that inspired the post title:
""You can't s--t on your employees and deliver" results."
This one is also revealing:
"It's amazing the reaction of people on my floor. People are openly
ecstatic. High-fiving," said an Atlanta store operations manager only
hours after the Jan. 3 announcement. "There's a group talking about
going to happy hour at noon."
Unfortunately, if you look at examples like Hollywood's Scott Rudin
and Disney's Michael Eisner, I fear that there are too many places
where the lesson seems to be "you can shit on your employees so long as
you deliver results." There are also other reasons that Bob Nardelli
got fired, indeed, one of the main lessons might be that that you
can't shit on shareholders and keep your job. But Nardelli's firing
does appear to be a solid blow for The No Asshole Rule, as it
suggests that dumping on employees can get your company in trouble with
shareholders too. Nardelli's style clearly put off some of the
analysts, as you can see from this post.
This excerpt from The No Asshole Rule provides another
example of how dumping on employees can drive down the stock price,
although the CEO kept his job and seemed to learn something from the
experience:
Neal Patterson, CEO of the Cerner Corporation,
learned this lesson in 2001 when he sent out a "belligerent" email that was
intended for just the top 400 people in this health care software firm.
According the The New York Times, Patterson complained that few
employees were working full 40 hour weeks, and "As managers -- you either do
not know what your EMPLOYEES are doing; or you do not CARE." Patterson said
that he wanted to see the employee parking lot ''substantially full'' between
7:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. weekdays and "half full on Saturdays, and that if it
didn't happen, he would take harsh measures, perhaps even layoffs and hiring
freezes. Patterson warned, ''You have two weeks,'' he said. ''Tick,
tock.''
Patterson's e-mail was leaked on the internet, provoking harsh criticism
from management experts including my Stanford colleague Jeff Pfeffer who
described in it The New York Times as "the corporate equivalent of whips and ropes and chains."
Pfeffer went a bit overboard for my tastes. But investors weren't pleased
either, as the value of the stock plummeted 22% in three days. Patterson
handled the aftermath well. He sent an apology to his employees, admitted
that he wished he had never sent the e-mail, and the share price did bounce
back. Patterson learned the hard way that, when CEO's who come across as
bullies, they can scare their investors, not just their underlings.
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
This article is posted under the creative commons license.
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