The San Francisco Chronicle published a nice interview with my colleague Bob Sutton about his new book The No Asshole Rule. I have a little blurb in the article about why it's so important to filter out jerks when you're trying to encourage innovative behavior.
I love Bob's book and I think the coverage it's receiving is great -- I hope that it pushes the world a little closer to a state of affairs where the pursuit of happiness in the workplace is not only encouraged, but is the norm. My only worry stems from the power of Google; will my descendants forever associate a web search on my name with the term "asshole"? I hope not. English is just so damn boring when it comes to swear words for the nether regions. If that association is going to be a sticky one, I'd much rather it be with something like the Spanish gilipollas or -- even more mellifluous to these ears -- the Italian cafone.
On a side note not even tangentially tied to cafones, I must apologize for two trends on metacool as of late. All of us on the staff of metacool are dedicated to writing thoughts about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life. But as of late we (I) haven't been posting that much, and what I have posted has usually been a pointer to something else rather than some (semi) original thinking. Why? Well, I'm not one to spend a lot of energy fabricating excuses, but I've been hella busy innovating. Deep in structuring some prototypes and figuring out where to go with them. Also, I'm busy getting the next version of Creating Infectious Action cranked up for the Spring Quarter at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. I'm looking forward to teaching it with a rather awesome group of individuals. More on that to come. One change is that it'll probably be called "CIA-KGB" for short, instead of just "CIA". So drop me a line and help me out with name brainstorming by letting me of any good verbs that start with a "K".
But creativity is endless. so expect a surge of posts (oh boy, has that word has been ruined forever, or what?) in the next few weeks as all this goo gels in my head.
Diego,
You've always had a way with words... thanks for all your support in this project. Diego not only helped with the ideas, he got me involved in this crazy blogging thing. My life would be a lot different -- and more boring -- without you Diego!
Meanwhile, the people at Electric Pulp tell me that we are up to over 22,000 completions for the ARSE... Asshole Rating Self Exam -- and over 30,000 original visitors. There is a lot of self-examination going on out there!
Check it out at http://electricpulp.com/guykawasaki/arse/
Posted by: Bob Sutton | 25 February 2007 at 09:18 AM