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

The average rating for The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-07-01 00:00:00 mike barbee I bought this because I thought I worked with assholes. (Well -- that, and a few others had enjoyed reading it.) I discovered that I work with garden-variety assholes, not certified ("flaming") assholes -- though I have in the past. Note that the author is an academic and wanted to enforce the "no asshole" rule in his own department. This doesn't just apply to corporate settings. The real revelation he gives is what he calls "total cost of asshole ownership". This insight alone will land the book on my CEO's desk. (1) Damage to victims and witnesses (lower productivity, high turnover, others unable to deliver information to or work with assholes) (2) Management consequences: time and effort spent "cooling out" employees and victimized customers; time spent recruiting and training replacements (3) Legal and HR: legal liability for severely flaming assholes (sexual harassment, etc) (4) Organizational damage: stifled creativity; inability to improve established systems; inability to attract high caliber employees.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-06-11 00:00:00 Chris Reitan 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.