The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

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Description

The essential roadmap for coping with friction at work, by the authors of Scaling Up Excellence All too often, getting important things done at work is hard, soul crushing and convoluted. Too much precious time is spent wading through corporate gunk. Friction eats away at our energy, creativity and productivity and makes business slow and unproductive. And yet so frequently, organisations make the wrong things easier to do, taking down guardrails when they should in fact hit the brakes. Over the past decade, Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao have made it their mission to understand this phenomenon. Now, in this no-nonsense guide, they have assembled the very best of their collective wisdom. They show how to cut down unnecessary bureaucracy, overcome obstacles and banish the unhelpful systems that avert real progress. The Friction Project is essential reading, whether you're the CEO of a multinational, an employee dealing with difficult colleagues, or a freelancer seeking to streamline the way you operate.

Reviews

Sutton and Rao take us on a delightful tour of bad emails, infuriating subscriptions and labyrinthine hiring processes - and they show us how to fix it all. Hard to put down and easy to like, this is a business book to savour. * Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective *
The ultimate guide to diagnosing and fixing the problems in your organization. If every leader took... this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place. * Adam Grant, author of Think Again *

Author Bio

Robert I. Sutton (Author) Bob Sutton is an organisational psychologist and Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, where he is a co-founder of the Technology Ventures Program at the famed D.School. Huggy Rao (Author) Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford. He is also a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science and the Sociological Research Association.