Outthinkers #105—Bob Sutton: Leveraging Friction in Your Organization
Bob Sutton is an organizational psychologist and professor of Management Science and Engineering at the Stanford Engineering School. He has given keynote speeches to more than 200 groups in 20 countries, and served on numerous scholarly editorial boards focused around his work on leadership, innovation, organizational change, and workplace dynamics.
His most recent book, THE FRICTION PROJECT: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, co-written with Huggy Rao is focused on scaling and leading at scale. Based on 10 years of research it outlines how to grow organizations, it suggests something really compelling: you know we all almost by default think we should be strive to build a “frictionless organization” to drive agility and efficiency.
Bob points out that friction is not bad on its own. In fact, you WANT to create friction to slow down “bad” things while reducing friction to promote good things. This can enhance performance, innovation, and help make sure you fall into the trap of letting bad things grow as the company scales.
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In this episode, he shares:
- How as organizations grow, they become increasingly complex over time and how to mitigate this
- How to identify where to "put in gas" vs. "pump the brakes" to slow down when it comes to new and ongoing initiatives
- Why running at full speed is not always the answer (and the surprising byproduct of doing so)
- What makes collaboration between individual team members and make teams as a whole efficient
- What is changing in the workforce, and what has changed in terms of what makes a good leader in light of that
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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
1:20—Introducing Bob + The topic of today’s episode
3:50—If you really know me, you know that...
5:05—What is your definition of strategy?
7:07—Can you talk to us about the premise of your book, The Friction Project, and its background?
10:50—Could you talk to us about the moments in which friction can be a good thing, or when to apply "gas vs. brakes
16:05—How do you recognize where to apply this idea of velocity vs. slowing down?
18:57—How is it that some teams seem to come together and work seamlessly, while others seem to struggle?
22:57—What is changing in business in terms of leadership, the way people work, etc.?
26:05—Can you talk to us about the importance of reducing frictions, especially in regards to technology?
26:50—How can people follow you and connect with you to continue learning from you?
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Additional Resources:
Author Website: bobsutton.net
Email: https://www.bobsutton.net/contact/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobsutton1/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wo
Thank you to our guests, thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
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