The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't Book

What a disappointment. This book should have written itself: who can't write a good book about assholes? The world is full of them, and Sutton's biggest problem should have been trying to sift through an inexhaustable supply of good stuff and funny bits. Instead we get a boring, humorless collection of basic psychology principles, statistics, and common sense. Entire pages are devoted to mindless recitations of research findings and statistics. The anecdotes are boring and focus around a very short list of people. Half of what's said is so obvious it doesn't need to be included. In short, Sutton himself is the asshole for wasting my time.

I don't think that the problem here is that I didn't understand his intent. I get that he is not just trying to compile a bunch of funny asshole stories and frat humor. It is also clear that Sutton knows his stuff: I do not disagree with any of his conclusions, and most of the underlying psychology that he spells out rings true with the little I can remember from college. My problem is simply that the book didn't have to be so damned boring. I do not want to know the results of all 17 studies that studied nearly the exact same thing. I do not need to hear a tepid example of someone's boorish behavior and then spend four pages listening to Sutton plod his way through conclusions and observations that were immediately obvious from the get go. And why did they have to be such lame examples to begin with? Where's the guy that gets all amped up on coke and completely flips out at work and pees on his secretary's desk and knocks out his boss and has to be dragged away by a team of security guards? Instead, we get people who interrupt other people at work and use aggressive body language. Had Sutton really opened up the forum to his readers and compiled a good list of truly astounding, bar-raising, standard-setting Grade A assholes, and written the book under the assumption that his readers were at least marginally intelligent and therefore don't need every obvious fact and conclusion painfully spelled out for them, we might have ended up with something worth reading. Instead, we have a lifeless little exercise in tedium that brought tears of boredom to my eyes, right up until I ripped them out with a fork so I didn't have to keep reading. Save the twenty three bucks, use it to buy some paint, then watch it dry. It sure beats reading this book.