KAREN MAY: It is my
absolute pleasure today to introduce you
to Jeffrey Pfeffer. And Jeff is a
professor at Stanford and an author/co-author
of 14 books, another one, I understand, in the
making-- so 14 and 1/2 books. And so he's got lots and
lots of areas of expertise, and we're here today to
talk about his latest book, "Leadership BS," which
is nothing, if not catchy, as a title. I am Karen May. I lead our People Development
Team here at Google, and I know we're joined not
only by folks in the room here today, but also
by a number of folks in other locations
via live stream. So welcome all of you. And I shared briefly with
Jeff a little bit of an and embarrassing fact,
which is I don't read very many leadership books. And I tend to read
the first chapter and feel like I kind
of got the point and maybe read like
the first paragraph of the rest of the chapters. There tends to be
a certain sameness. And so I left about
that much time to read this book,
which is no offense. But what I found when
I started reading is I kind of put my feet up
on the couch and leaned back and slowed down, and I said,
oh, this is very interesting. This is really different,
and so I was so pleased that I had the opportunity
to directly ask you questions because it was
a very thought-provoking book. And I know we can't assume
today the you've all had the chance to read it yet. I imagine many of you will
following our conversation because you too will
be very intrigued. So I'd like to just start off
with the first question, which as I shared with you, I'm
very curious because you've written at least two
books in one, maybe three with this book. And two of the themes
that you wove together-- one is essentially, excuse
my paraphrase here-- you can correct me you like-- is
that the things that we say we want in our leaders are not
necessarily the things that we get in our leaders, nor are
they necessarily the things that are rewarded in our leaders. So we have a disconnect. Similarly, we have a
multi-billion dollar leadership development industry,
which claims to help people develop into
that former set of things that we say we want
in our leaders, and yet it doesn't do
a good job of that. And so you have commentary on
both of those states of affairs in this book. And I'm curious about
why you wrote the book and why you chose
to address both of those important
questions together. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Wow! KAREN MAY: No softball
questions to get us started. JEFFREY PFEFFER:
So I wrote the book because I was angry,
which turns out to make writing the book much
quicker-- you know, emotion, motivation-- whatever. I am increasingly frustrated
by a combination of things. Number one, that
people who would take my Path to Power class
at Stanford and say to me, wow, your class
is very different, which I always take
as a compliment because I take anything as
a compliment at this point. You know, they say your
class is very different. It contradicts what we've
learned from other leadership books or what we've learned
in other courses at Stanford. And that was kind
of interesting. And then I am
frustrated by the fact that it's the dirty
little secret. The Stanford Business
School is, of course, very highly selective. We have extremely, fabulously
fantastic students-- probably now the most
selective business school in the country--
hardest to get into. And in spite of the fact
that we are highly selective and have these brilliantly
stunningly wonderful human beings who come to us,
within the first 24 months of their graduation
from Stanford, a reasonably high-- though since
nobody has studied it, I can't give you exact data,
but my anecdotal evidence from talking to a
few former students is that somewhere between
10% and 20% of our students will be fired within
the first two years. So that's a high
percentage, I mean, because these are highly
selective, highly selected, fabulously fantastic people. The idea that one of them would
be fired let alone somewhere between 10% and 20%
is I think shocking, and of course, the
reason why they're fired is because they believe
the stuff they've been told in the other classes. So I think we as an
institution are failing. I certainly in my past with
the Power class, I have as one of the objectives that
you should never have to leave a job involuntarily. We are preparing
you so that you know how to survive in the world. That's the second thing. But the thing that makes
me the angriest, of course, is the enormous
amount of hypocrisy. I can tolerate people lying,
cheating, and stealing, and doing everything else. It's part of the world, and
some of them are actually, I guess, now running
for president. But in any event, what I
don't take very well to is the hypocrisy. The people who stand up at
Our View From the Top series or go and write these
books and describe them and their
characteristics as a leader, which bear almost no
resemblance to their behavior and to what they've done. But many people in the
world believe this. So you can read Rudy
Giuliani's book on leadership. Or you can read-- I'll get
myself into plenty of trouble because this is broadcast,
but his name is in the book, so I mate as well
say it-- Bill George, who is CEO of Medtronic. And you know, he
wrote "True North." Just a lovely book written
with my dear friend and former student Pete Sims. And I actually very
innocently served on-- not innocently--
served on the board. I was on board with somebody
who had worked with Bill George at Medtronic, and when "True
North " came out, I said, wow! It must have been great
to work with Bill. The response was, that's not the
Bill George who I experienced. But this is not to say
anything about Bill. I think is typical. I make a point in chapter 1 of
the book to talk about why it is difficult for people to tell
the truth even if they wanted to, which by the way, in
many instances, they don't. I think memory selective-- we
know from studies of recall of auto accidents or crimes that
even if there's no incentive for you to misremember,
memory is imperfect, and so we're certainly going to
have motivated imperfect memory around what I did as a leader
and wonderful I was and how everybody loved me
even if they don't. By the way, if you want
a little test of this, ask your friends and colleagues
about failed relationships. You get distorted
memory there too, often in a different direction. So that's why I wrote the book. The reason why I wove
the two themes together is because I think
they're actually-- I believe they may be
related-- that the reason why we say we want a set
of characteristics, and we don't get
them is in part, I think, because we have
a leadership industry that is living in some mythical
world of the shoulds and the oughts kind of like
Sunday school, which is fine. I have nothing
against religion-- or Saturday school
or Friday school depending upon your
particular belief. I have nothing against
religion, but I think we should not confuse
aspirational preaching or lay preaching
with social science. And to me, I think the
two pieces are connected. But the reason why we have
done such a lousy job, manifestly lousy
job, of building, with the exception of Google
and my friends at SAS Institute, who typically rank
about in the top five of places to work list every year. But for the most part,
workplaces are horrible. All data suggests it's awful. Employees are disengaged. Job satisfaction is horrible. My favorite statistic,
which was picked up in "The Economist"
review of this book last week was "Parade
Magazine" in 2012 said, would you rather
have a substantial raise or be able to fire your boss? And 35% of the people
said, fire my boss. I think leaders are failing and
not having a good experience either. So the leadership
industry has failed, and I think the disconnect
is one, not the only one, but it's one manifestation
of the failure, so that's why I rolled
the two together. KAREN MAY: So one of
the things that you outline in a sense is we
say we want these things modesty, honesty, transparency,
care for others-- those kinds of things. And yet those things
aren't rewarded. But there's a glimmer
of hope, if you will, that when done well and
not with leaders who to 100% in those directions. But leaders who lead well,
there's a possibility that it actually can be both
good for the organization and the leader's career
and self-interest, but that the leaders
career, the employees, and the organization has three
different stakeholder groups, as you will, often create
this triangle of tension with the leader in the middle,
and they will solve first for their career and often
second for the organization because those two tend
to be best aligned, and it's the employees
who suffer as a result. Is that an accurate-- JEFFREY PFEFFER: I
think that's quite fair. KAREN MAY: So if we've
got this stakeholder triangle and the potential of
those actually being aligned to elicit behavior that
works for the leader's career, the organization,
and the employees, how do we begin to
shift from a state where those are unaligned,
which reinforces the disconnect, to one where they
become better aligned? JEFFREY PFEFFER:
That was a question I was going to ask you. KAREN MAY: I got it out first. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Since you're
a professional in this field. Well, you know,
I'm not 100% sure that you actually can align it. It depends upon again what the
literature you want to access and what scholarship
you want to access. But one of the fundamental
principles of sociobiology is that the interests of the
individual and the interests of the group are frequently
at odds with one another because-- so to take
an extreme example, if someone were to
roll a live hand grenade into this
room, what's good for the group is for somebody
to throw their body on it, but that's not what's
good for that individual. And there are many
ways in which what produces individual
fitness and what produces the best outcomes
for the group are not aligned. You want parents
to forgo food so that their children can live. Or you wan the individuals--
I guess the best example would be the Donner Pass. Hopefully, we'll have
snow this winter, but the Donner
Party getting stuck in the thing and
some people, I don't think they volunteered,
but anyway, being eaten by the rest
of the Donner Party so they could
survive the travail. That would be, again,
unaligned interest. I'm not sure that it is
possible to completely align the interests. And I'm not sure that many
of the qualities that we say we want or not only that,
but we don't apparently want-- but I'm not even sure
they're even good for people or whatever. So one of my favorites
is authenticity, which we can talk about later. KAREN MAY: Let's do it now. That was one of
my questions too. Can I interrupt you? JEFFREY PFEFFER: Sure. KAREN MAY: The
authenticity-- because one of things that you said
that caught my attention was that authenticity
can actually be bad for an organization. We all talk about authenticity. So say a little bit more
about when authenticity becomes problematic or toxic. JEFFREY PFEFFER:
Well, first of all, like much of the
leadership stuff, if you search for authenticity
on my favorite search engine, which is
in fact Google, you get a billion definitions
or a lot of definitions, many of which are basically like
a list of positive attributes that don't comport to any kind
of definition of authenticity that I would believe. But if you look at
the more fundamentally scholarly literature
of authenticity, it talks about being
true to yourself. And I don't believe that leaders
need to be true to themselves at all. They need to be true to what
the human beings around them need and want. So one of the examples
I use in the book-- I have a dear friend
whose daughter fell in with a bad crowd. Her boyfriend gave her drugs. She had an overdose. Five months later she was dead. But, unfortunately,
she did not die that night, which would have
been better for everybody. And as he and his
wife watched her die, and I could describe
that if anybody wants, what that process is
like to be brain dead and have your muscles
atrophy, and even though most of the brain is not functioning,
the pain of the muscles contracting-- so there
is this poor, basically unconscious human
being, screaming, and he was this very senior
administrator at a university, and for the first minute or two,
or week, or day, or whatever, people are sympathetic, and
they are always, of course, concerned for him and about him. But sooner or later, he
has to go back to work, and his team, as
much as they love him and as wonderful as he is,
fundamentally, after a while, they forget it is
about, you know, you need to serve-- you
need to serve the group. We need your energy. We need your commitment. We need your
emotional involvement. We need your leadership in the
sense of strategic direction and all these other things. And I can assure you that
there were many days, there probably still are
many days, when he wakes up, and the last thing
he wants to do is go to work at some higher
education university position because as he said,
you lose a child, it will stay with
you all your life. It is a sadness which is an
ineffable part of his soul. But on the other hand, that's
not what you've been hired for. And you have to show up
and do something different. And the less extreme
example, Gary Loveman, who just stepped down as CEO
of Caesars Entertainment, first time he came to my class
because I wrote a case on him, he was running 101
degree temperature. He had the flu. No sentient human being
with 101 degree temperature wants to do four hours
of class with me. So if he's being
true to himself, I want to be home in bed. But part of the job of
a leader is to convey-- and he would do this when he
would show up at his casinos-- more important than my class. As he said once to my class in
a video which I've seen so often now it's memorized,
people need your energy. They need your physical energy. They need your
intellectual energy. They need your emotional energy,
and they need your energy even if at that moment in time
you've got marital trouble or your children are acting
up, or you don't feel well. People need your
energy, and so the idea of being authentic to
yourself seems a little too self-centered. You show up at the
leadership role, you have a responsibility to
the people you're being led by. And so part of the skill of
being a leader is the ability, I think, to act in ways
that you're not necessarily feeling at the time. I may be tired. I may be depressed. I may be distracted. But in terms of
getting the job done, I have to show up in a
fully present, engaged, energetic way. Does that make sense? KAREN MAY: It does. It does. So it comes, in a sense, back to
the definition of authenticity and also to one of the points
you make about the leadership training industry is
we sort of glamorize and perhaps exaggerate
these traits so that authenticity
means being completely and utterly vulnerable
and open at all times. JEFFREY PFEFFER: And being
true to your wants and needs. KAREN MAY: Right. Being true to your
own wants and needs versus a more realistic
definition, which might have to do with evaluating
what your team needs from you or what your organization
needs from you, checking to make sure you're not
violating fundamental values, and defining authenticity
on a longer-term scale than in the moment,
how am I doing? But what's the
connection for me there is when our industry
defines things in an unrealistic way
or an idealistic way, we set a standard that's
unrealistically high, and that then becomes something
that people can't achieve, and that exaggerates perhaps
the gap that already exists. JEFFREY PFEFFER: I
think that's right, and also we presume--
authenticity is an interesting thing
because it presumes you need to be true to
your authentic self, but which authentic self? Your authentic self when
you were 18 months old? One of the other stories
is my favorite example is my dear friend
Alison Davis-Blake. I like to say I knew Alison
Davis-Blake before she was hyphenated. I knew where she Alison Davis
and was probably the world shyest doctoral student that you
could ever possibly imagine-- could hardly speak up in class. If she spoke up, you would not
know because you couldn't hear. And she is today dean of the--
she is just stepping down as dean of the Ross School at
the University of Michigan. And she's probably
going to go on to be a provost or a
university president, and if you talk to Alison,
she will tell you-- she's still-- I don't
think she did a personality transplant or something. She's still basically
an introvert. But she said to be an introvert,
define it, I don't know, whatever, to be true that. She said, I figured
out after a while that the behaviors
associated with that label, being introverted, was not
very useful for my career. I was not going to
be able to be a dean or president or an associate
dean or probably even a functioning teacher if I was
going to be that shy so nobody could hear me. And so I believe, which is one
of the themes of the class I teach, is that
human beings-- you don't have to
change who you are, but you need change
your behaviors, and we can all learn and
adopt behaviors that make us better able to function. So she's a fabulous
public speaker. She's obviously been
extremely successful, and she will be a provost
or a university president of a major university. And if you had known her
in 1986, if you there had been a list of
1,000 people who was going to be a dean
or university president, she would have been
last on the list. And this is partly in her
case, saying to herself, I will re-invent myself. I will develop skills and
resilience and toughness that I never thought I had. And that's just perfect. KAREN MAY: So the
self evolves, and we need to allow space for that. Many of the examples
in your book focus on CEOs kind of the
senior level executive who might hypothesize are more
subject to the tension in the stakeholder triangle,
if you will, than some others. But I'm curious because you
spoke mostly about them. Do you see the same
disconnect kind of all levels of
leaders and managers? Or does it get worse at top? JEFFREY PFEFFER:
Well, no, actually I think it's easier at the top
because most people at the top are particularly not
at the top because they are company founders. But they've worked their way up. They've overcome anything
that worries them about except their
own careers in case you haven't been reading the
newspaper about people who are pretty much self interested. Many of the studies
that I cite are studies of people throughout
the career course. The effect of narcissism
on career success has been studied at the
level of presidents, but it's also been studied
at the levels of selection and to the officer
ranks in the military. So I think this holds
throughout the career. And I see you have coming
or somebody told me that you have coming my good
friend Adam Galinsky-- "Friend and Foe." And that is a
different kind of issue but a another kind of tension
because people are both friends and foes in the same time. In organizational
hierarchies, you are both peers and competitors. So you have to collaborate and
cooperate at the same time. That's right. You have to look out for
the organization's interest. To some extent, you have to
look out for your own interests. My dear friend Joe
Podolny, who works for a company you may have
heard of called Apple. You know, when I wrote
the book before this, "Power," he and I met at Apple--
the food's not as good as here. But in any event, we had
this wonderful discussion in which he said, you
basically are telling people that they need to take
care of themselves. I said, well Joel, you haven't
been at Apple for all that long. But 30 or 40 years ago
in the Silicon Valley there became a
mantra, and I don't know if this is true of
Google, but I suspect it is, and the mantra that came
out of the Silicon Valley and still exists
is that we are not responsible for your career. You are responsible
for your career. We are responsible to
give you interesting jobs. We are responsible to give
you learning opportunities and growth opportunities. But in most companies, and I
suspect Google's one of them, the first things you do when
you either get recruited or sign on, you sign
an at-will statement. We are employed at-will. We can be fired for good
cause, no cause, any cause. By the way, this
is the only country in the world that has
at-will employment. But that's another story. So I said, for 40 years you and
your colleagues in the Silicon Valley have said
to people they are responsible for their career. What I tell people
is when people tell you're responsible for your
career, take them seriously. Believe the message. Believe the message. You're responsible for your
career means that then you need to take care of yourself. And you cannot say-- not
that I'm a big Freudian, but what Freud would say is that
ever since we're expelled from our mother's womb, we're looking
for the protective loving figure to take care of us. And it could be some
godlike figure in his book, "Delusion and
Dream," or it could be the big company that is
going to take care of me-- the company. I could lose myself
in the company, and the company is going
to look out for me. Maybe Google does that pretty
well, and they probably do. But most companies don't. And so you need to
take care of yourself. You are a fully
functioning adult. Stop looking for the maternal or
paternal warmth and love. This is just a
transactional world. It's kind of a depressing
way to look at it. But it's on the other
hand, as I tell people, I'm depressed when I see
former students of mine lose their jobs. That to me is way
more depressing than have them go into where
they are with their eyes open. KAREN MAY: So would your outcome
be that folks reading your book would walk away saying, ah,
things are different than I wish and different than maybe I
thought, and I need to operate differently as a result
or that people would say, things are different
than I would wish, and I want to figure out
how to start to change that? So I think you've given
advice in your book on both. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Both. I would say both. I would say absolutely both. The subtitle of this
book is "Changing Workplaces and Careers
One Truth at a Time." I don't believe we're going
to change the situation that exists in the world
without understanding the psychological and
sociological dynamics that produce this behavior. We need to understand
where this comes from. We have to understand
the rules of the game. If we want fewer
concussions in professional, or for that matter,
amateur football, the first thing we
need to understand is number one, how many
concussions there are. And so one of the interesting
things about the leadership industry is that there
all these recommendations. So my favorite
trick for people who give these talks which
I hate is to say, OK, you told me that leaders should
tell the truth or "Leaders Eat Last," Simon Sinek's
book, or whatever. Can you give me an estimate
of what percentage of leaders engage in this behavior? And, of course, it's
always met with silence. We have no measures
if base rates. So if I said to you,
this is the difference between management and medicine
we've known for 400 years that if I want to
encourage-- if I want to produce healthy
outcomes, hygiene is important. So we know doctors
all wash their hands in antiseptic solutions. And we know that 60% of all SARS
cases during the Sudden Acute Respiratory Distress
Syndrome were spread through the hands
of health care workers. So we know. So here I would say you
measure a base rate. What percentage of
people wash their hands? OK, why do they not
wash their hands? Now we could figure
out interventions. We could measure the effect
of those interventions. And leadership, I want you
to be authentic or take care of others or whatever. What percentage of
people are doing it? I'm clueless. What are interventions
that will cause a higher percentage of people to do it? I'm clueless because
I haven't measured how many people are doing it. How can we possibly get any--
there is no theory, science, or logic that would suggest that
is a situation in which things are going to improve. In order to improve, I have
to know where they are. I have to try different
experiments, which is something that Google does-- good--
which is wonderful. But do experiments just as
you would run experiments on your website or on search
engines or search results, you run experiments
with this as well, and how are we doing, and
are things getting better, or are we not getting better? And if they're not
getting better, why not? And that's the only way. This idea that things
are going to get better by telling ourselves our version
of your favorite fairytale, I just don't see any evidence. There's not a scintilla of that. Nor is there any
logic that suggests that would make it any better. So on the one hand,
I think we ought to try to make
things better, and we ought to create a
healthier, better world. The book that I'm currently
writing-- actually, I'm writing two books, but I
can hardly write one anymore because we just
bought a new house, and my wife has assigned
me the job of fixing it up, which is interesting in
any event, but it's fine. The book that I'm
writing-- the book is mostly finished in which I
hope to finish reasonably soon. The working title is "Dying for
a Paycheck," and two colleagues who are much smarter
mathematically than I. They are operations
research people. They built this wonderful model
based upon epidemiological data and a meta-analysis we did
based upon survey data, which tries to estimate
incidence of this is. Our estimate is 120,000
excess deaths a year in the United States
from workplace stress, which by the way, would
make the workplace the fifth leading cause of
death behind heart disease and cancer, but ahead of
Alzheimer's and diabetes. It's horrible. We literally have
toxic workplaces, and we ought to do
something about that. But if we're going to
do something about that, we also need to understand. I see all these pieces as
being part of the same-- KAREN MAY: Fitting together. JEFFREY PFEFFER:
Fitting together. KAREN MAY: You make
a case, as you just did here, that before--
so there is a ray of hope. We could potentially
fix the problem, but before we can
fix the problem, we have to understand
the problem. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Of course. KAREN MAY: To
understand the problem, we have to apply what
we know about science and measurement to leadership
and management, which luckily is something many
of us value here. We have a bunch of
real scientists here. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Of course. Not every place is like Google. KAREN MAY: I am
curious where you see people doing
the science well and what we might be
able to learn from, and you mentioned a couple of
examples in the book of places where people incorporate
what we know about behavior change, the science
of behavior change, into practice where we're asking
people to set specific goals and give them feedback
on those goals, and I think there
are a few examples. What kinds of things
would you leave us with as either people or
institutions that are really doing good science in our arena,
even if they are the minority? JEFFREY PFEFFER: Well, I don't
know that many besides Google. I'm not sure-- Google and
SAS Institute and probably a relatively small number
of other places because part of what I think distinguishes
good leaders, good managers, good people is an
intellectual curiosity. And one of the striking things
about life-- I have a colleague named Dennis Tourish,
who some years ago did a survey-- he's a
Scottish professor. And he did a survey in which
he asked Scottish executives not what books were they
reading, but had they read any. And the answer
would astonish you. First of all, we live in a
country where 25% of the people don't believe in evolution. And that's a true figure. So it should not astonish
you that we do not have a lot of
people-- we don't have a lot of companies
doing what you're doing, which is having book talks. We don't have a lot
of senior leaders who have any intellectual
curiosity at all like how things work. One of the things I
love about Gary Loveman is he would say,
OK, you know, I want to teach by people how to think. So if people are aren't
doing-- if we're not getting a large share of
their gaming dollar, why not? Why are they choosing
the competitors? So you ask a series of
analytical questions, and if the questions
are asked, well, you can figure out eventually
how to get the data and do the analysis. But if you don't start
with the questions, you're not going
to get anywhere. And so I don't see
the typical CEO-- so I'll tell a story on one
of your semi-competitors. I have a dear friend named Roger
Martin who just stepped down as the dean of the Rotman
University of Toronto Business School. So Roger and I were
together at a conference, and we were talking
about life and things, and we exchanged
emails, and he said it's amazing how there is this
idea that if you're a CEO, any word that comes out
of your mouth is correct. So he said, there's been a big
controversy, as many of you know, about whether
or not there's a real shortage of engineers
and technical employees or not. And he's been very active in
Toronto doing a strategic plan for the province of Ontario,
and he's been very involved with Statistics Canada. And he engaged in
exchange with Microsoft about the issue of how
many engineers there were and the number of engineers. And he has a thing
which he forwarded to me for the Microsoft PR
department that basically said, if Bill Gates said
it, it's true-- literally, it's true. There's no evidence. The statistics from Canada,
at least for the providence of Ontario which is where
the debate was about, suggested it was completely
made it up says it must be true. So we live in a world in
which the CEOs make stuff up. And we have a presidential
candidate who makes stuff up. Immigrants cause crime. How do we know it? Because it came out of
Donald Trump's mouth. There's not a
scintilla of evidence for this-- any studies of this
or proportions of immigrants-- proportions of that. I wrote the bestselling
business book of all time. No, but it doesn't matter. If you say it and say it
with enough conviction, it becomes true. In this kind of world,
we need science, but it's not very prevalent. I'm sure you saw that when you
were in Terra Nova Consulting and had to do-- KAREN MAY: It's true. JEFFREY PFEFFER: So how did
you go about changing it? KAREN MAY: Well,
first, Jeff said is it OK if I ask you a couple
of questions, which it is, but start thinking of your
questions because in a minute, Cliff is ready with the mic,
and we'll hear from some of you. How did I go about changing it? I can't take responsibility
for changing it, but I did join a place
that really values science. And I think at
Google because we are an engineering-led
organization, and we value making decisions
objectively, if you don't have the data,
it doesn't matter how compelling the case is. What matters is that
you are informed. And one of the things
that I've seen here that I saw much less often when
I was an external consultant is that our leaders
will change their minds in the face of data. And that is something that you
don't always see elsewhere. You don't see the data. You don't see it presenting. You don't see people
change their minds. And I think teaching
people here as we often do, and these folks in the room
will help teach people-- teaching people to use data
to help influence decision making is a critical capacity
and capability to teach, absolutely. Questions, folks? Cliff is there with the
mic if you have one. AUDIENCE: There's a lot
of stuff at the moment about self-management. So get rid of managers,
get rid of leaders-- JEFFREY PFEFFER: Holacracy? AUDIENCE: So do you
believe in that, then? JEFFREY PFEFFER: Do I
believe in holacracy? The evidence suggests
over years and decades that-- people have been talking
about the end of hierarchy for probably 70 years. And there are a
little experiments. I actually don't believe
Zappos is such an experiment. As I have pointed out to several
reporters, everything I say, of course, gets me into
trouble, which is fine. The idea that holacracy
is imposed from on top and that anybody who
doesn't agree with holocracy should leave is a contradiction
in the idea of self-management, but whatever. But Ricardo Semler
in Brazil has this. I think there are cooperative
forms of organization that work-- Mondragon in
Spain, which I actually visited some years ago. The John Edwards Cooperative
in the United Kingdom. There are certainly
self-governing, semi-democratic forms of organizations,
which include basically every law partnership, most
of the public accounting partnerships, many
management consulting firm partnerships where
they elect the CEO, but the CEOs are elected
at least by the partners. So that is a form
of self-governance and self-management. But if you read Herbert
Simon who was deceased, his book or the
article that was based on the book, "The
Architecture of Complexity." Hierarchy is pervasive
in the natural world. You see hierarchy
in schools of fish. You see hierarchy even in
apparently even organisms more simple than
schools of fish. Hierarchy is
relatively pervasive, and I see, again,
many of my students, who are now ex-students,
come into companies and they say, well,
we're not political here. Everybody's equal. That's probably not true. There is one CEO. There is one school
superintendent, and in 2018 there is going to
be a new governor of California. I don't see much evidence
that non-hierarchical systems do very well because in almost
any size and complexity, hierarchy emerges
almost naturally. And my colleague,
Larissa Tiedens, did some studies that show
that when you give people a choice of how they want to
organize-- when you tell them they have to accomplish a
task, they organize voluntarily into an hierarchical
arrangement. AUDIENCE: I have a question
about how leadership is informed by
multicultural companies, and you mentioned that
10% to 20% of students may get laid off within
the first two years. JEFFREY PFEFFER: They
don't get laid off. They get fired. AUDIENCE: All right,
they get fired. JEFFREY PFEFFER: We need
to be clear about that. AUDIENCE: OK, so can you
comment whether you speculate that's because they go into
a multicultural company-- that they had to figure
out different cultures because of that? JEFFREY PFEFFER: It happens. I'll tell you a
story, which is going to sound so weird that you're
going to believe it's made up, but it's not. I have a woman,
a former student, who is actually a
little even older, calls me on the phone one
day, and she's in tears because she needs to work. And she needs a
job, and so she has been at a company, a high-tech
company, and obviously, not this company, and she
is-- so what's the problem? She's about to be fired, why? Because she has gone
into the organization, and the organization said,
we are an organization that believes in
openness and transparency and continuous improvement,
and therefore you should tell everybody
at all moments kind of what we do in
our class at Stanford called touchy feely--
interpersonal dynamics. We got to share your feelings
and share your honest feedback with them. And you in particular
ought to tell people what you think
they're doing right and what they think
they're doing wrong, and she shared her
honest feedback. She had a boss. She didn't think the boss was
very good, which is probably true, and she told the boss. Her career is over. And I said, now how--
this woman is smart enough to get into Stanford
Business School. She's actually
smart, very smart. Smart but not wise. I said what possessed you? What momentary, whatever,
what is it demonic possession or something? She said, no, the
organization said number one, we want to be
continuously getting better-- sounds reasonable. And the best way to get
continuously getting better is to provide people with open
and honest feedback on how they're doing, which is by the
way, also factually correct. So I said, they told me
they want to get better. This makes sense that
I'm going to give people constructive feedback in
a constructive fashion so they can improve
their performance. So I believed them, and
I said to her, I said, did you ask-- did you do any
diligence on these statements like what happened
to the last person who gave constructive feedback,
and where are they now? So one of the jokes
that I sometimes make is if I sat up here,
and I said, I've discovered the cure for
cancer, and I will sell it to you or to Google for $500
million, which by the way, had I discovered
the cure for cancer would be the biggest bargain
in the history of life. How many of you
are going to write me a check for $500 million? And the answer is
nobody, because you will do due diligence. You will say, if I
have a technology that is going to provide some medical
benefit or for that matter, any contact with a benefit,
we will use medical benefit for the moment, you will
do sufficient due diligence to understand is
the technology real? Are there patents? Is there intellectual property? Does it work? But when we come-- when we see
these leaders write the books or give the talks or whatever--
we believe it uncritically. We don't even spend a nanosecond
of doing due diligence. It's true. What happened to the people? Are they living their beliefs? You know, I have friends--
one of friends stimulating me to write this book who talks
about himself as a leader. My god, all you have to
do is go to the city where he spends a good
portion of his time when he's not lecturing at
Stanford and do a search-- public records-- public records. You can see the suits
by his partners. In 30 minutes, you can-- why. So one of my recommendations
is don't believe-- trust but verify or something. Get a hold of data. When people tell you a story,
find out whether it's true. Volkswagen had a story that
turned out not to be true. You have a diesel car
with great gas mileage-- I don't think so-- and meet the
emissions standards, maybe not. So we need to verify
what we are told, and I think that is the first
and most important thing is just ask what's
real and what isn't KAREN MAY: So there's
some coping strategies for dealing in today's
real world while at the same time getting the
base rate measurement that it will enable us to affect
change systematically using good scientific principles. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Yeah, one of
things that also drives me nuts is how we evaluate leadership
development activities. So the leadership development
industry is this huge industry. People go to these
conferences, and at the end of the conference, you
fill out a happy sheet. You know, did you
have a good time? Were the doughnuts good? Or whatever-- it's interesting. And we know that for four
decades ago in the early 1970s was to the best of
my ability to discern it the first study of the
relationship between instructor ratings and objective
measures of learning. So it was a calculus class,
a big state university, you know , a big calculus class
where in the olden days before the invention of technology--
these enormous tiered classrooms, and they heard
a professor lecture about calculus, and then they
put everybody in discussion sections. At the end of the semester,
everybody took the same test. They were randomly assigned
essentially to sections. So here's the perfect thing. You're going to ask to
what extent is there a correlation between
teacher ratings, the core section ratings, and
objective measures of learning. The answer is zero. And that's 40 years of
research has demonstrated that. It's no different than
the leadership development industry. We are rewarding entertainment. We're getting entertainment. And that's another reason why
there's absolutely no progress. So one of my favorite stories
of in this book-- somebody who was considering
me for a talk. They chose somebody else. So I said, you know, it's fine. Actually, many times this
woman called me and told me that they haven't chosen me. I said, can you explain to
me the selection criteria. She said, yeah. She said, we picked somebody
else, and gave me the name, because he's better looking,
and by they way on the web, he is better looking. I'd have picked him too. But think about this. The next time you go
look at the conference and who is big on the
conference circuit? People who have compelling,
interesting stories. Do they know anything? Absolutely not. KAREN MAY: Or maybe not. We don't know. Because we're not measuring it. We don't know. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Yes,
we don't even know. KAREN MAY: OK, Debbie. AUDIENCE: All right, thanks. Another lens that we try to look
at leadership through at Google is the lens of diversity
and asking our leaders to be inclusive leaders. And we're really trying
to get that right. Are there any hard truths about
that we should understand? Or what do you think? JEFFREY PFEFFER: Well,
not beyond the hard truth that you probably
already know which is that people love people
who remind them of themselves. It's short. I love the "New York Times." Their science
fiction is fabulous. So some years ago, a
guy named Benedict Carey wrote a nice article
called, "You Remind Me of Me," which of course,
reminds us of the fact that we love people who look
like us, sound like us-- this is about
behavioral imitation. So one of things I actually
talked about this morning in executive education class
I was talking out at Stanford. And a woman raised her
hand, and she said, what is your recommendation? My recommendation is if
behavior limitation works, and there's no evidence
that it doesn't, then you ought to imitate. You don't have to get
a sex change operation, but you can imitate gestures. You can imitate intonation. I don't know. I'm sure some
people in this room have seen Amy JC Cuddy's
TED talk on power posing. Absolutely. So you can do things and use
dialect or inflection or words or gestures. Whatever. That, by the way, cuts
across race or gender. You can use
behavioral limitation so that even though I don't
look like you or you don't look like me or we don't
like each other, you can look in a sense
of the use of language, in the sense of
some other stuff. So you can take the fact that
we understand similarities, the basis of interpersonal
attraction, and use that. And I've seen some women
in particular or people of color do, which is to
remind the people that they're interacting with what
they have in common. So I may be different,
but there are many things that we have in common. We work in the
same organization. We went to the same university. We're stuck on
the same airplane, which is going
nowhere or whatever this is that we have in common. So you can find those things. KAREN MAY: That's an
interesting example of how I see you over and over
and over take the research-- social psychology in this
case, and in many cases take the social
psychology research and say, if this is true,
then how do we create a better world around that, and how
do we operate realistically in the world we're in today. And I think those are the two--
one of the many tensions you create in your book
is how do we hold true the operate effectively in
the world in which we are functioning and
at the same time, work to make it a world in which
we'd like to be functioning, and that's the hope and
fear aspects of your book. I think Debbie-- and it's
interesting to think about to your question how we can
help leaders be the ones to find the thing
they have in common and take the onus off of people
who want to be seen for all they have to contribute as
having to also then build that connection but have
leaders really looking for that. AUDIENCE: So you mentioned about
people dying from workplace stress, and I just read
about a company that instituted a five-hour workday. So I'm wondering
how do you balance not enforcing a
five-hour workday, but saying please take
one, and then not having the social pressure of people
wanting to show leadership by then not abiding by
a five-hour workday? JEFFREY PFEFFER: Well, work
hours is one source of problem, but the biggest
source of workplace-- there are two sources--
so work hours is obviously a source of workplace stress
particularly to the extent that it entails and engages
work/family conflict. But the biggest sources
of workplace stress are number one,
economic insecurity. So people with
families and mortgages have economic obligations
that don't come and go. And there are many places--
our friend down the road at HP, which is as near as
I could determine, could only do layoffs. I believe that's what
they manufacture today. Somebody said,
what does HP make? I said, they make layoffs
on a regular basis. It's not really a joking matter. There's a lot of
epidemiological literature on the harmful health
effects of being laid off. Economic insecurity
is an enormous source of stress in today's
economy where you have people in the so-called
freelancer, gig economy. You have companies--
Caterpillar, HP, which we made a joke about, and
the companies are laying people off all the time. That's an enormous source
of workplace stress. A second source of
workplace stress is an absence of job control. So the question isn't
how hard you work. The question is-- do
you have any discretion? So if I give you a task to do,
it could be a challenging task. But if you have some
discretion on the resources that you muster and when
you do it and how you do it, that's much less stressful
than saying to you, by the way, I need the report by noon. It's now 10:00 in the morning. Oh, never mind, I need a
different report by noon. Oh, never mind,
I need you to go. So I have a friend that
works for a company that shall remain nameless. But it's not going to remain
nameless in the "Dying for a Paycheck" book. We're supposed to go out
with Sootha and Sima. The joke is they are the
Indian children we never had because we don't
have any children. But we love them like
children, and they love us like parents or something
or like friends. And Sima, who works for some
very fancy Bay Area company. Sootha emails me
Saturday morning. This is Saturday morning. We're going to see them
Saturday night to go to the Mars in San Francisco dinner. It rains beforehand. What should we do? Sima has been caught told this
morning to get on a plane. By the way, she's also
seven months pregnant-- to get on a plane, be
in Europe on Sunday to do a sales and marketing
meeting on Monday. No control. That's stressful. Not we're going to give
you five-weeks notice. Not we're going to ask what
is your preference to get the work done that we have. You're a marketing
executive in this company, but there is some
responsibilities. You don't want to go
on maternity leave yet. That's fine. Here are some stuff you need to
get accomplished and figure out how to do it. That's very different. By the way, she has an MBA
from Harvard-- smart woman, even though it's from
Harvard, it's fine. It's very different than
saying, I am your boss. Get your ass on an airplane
tonight-- very different. That's stressful. That is I have no
control over my life. Someone at any moment
could have me doing stuff. Not, I got a set of jobs
and a task to accomplish. This is, go here,
go here, go there, do that-- not a good thing. The third source of stress--
this is also controllable and prior to the passage
of the Affordable Care Act, and actually, post the passage
of the Affordable Care Act, which not very affordable,
the third source of stress is that many people
in this country do not have access to decent
medical care because of health insurance. Even company-provided health
insurance, many people aren't covered, and the co-pays
have gone up, blah de blah. So I know people
stressed out about how do I care for
myself and my family with health issues and
all that kind of stuff. So there are many dimensions of
stress besides the work hours. And the work hours, you
know, my friend Jim Goodnight at SAS Institute would say,
my job as the leader of SAS is to try to get all the
unnecessary stuff out of your life so that if you
actually work 40 hours a week, you work 30 hours more than
you're currently working on productive stuff
as opposed to dealing with the bureaucracy
and the useless meetings and the stresses--
the wonderful thing that we've done in
benefits administration, hopefully not at
Google, but who knows, where we've said everybody needs
to be an expert on everything. So we're going to have
self-directed retirement accounts. We're going to have
self-directed medical stuff. Everybody's responsible
for everything. So everybody has to
become an expert. I wrote a column about this when
"Business 2.0" was still alive, so this is more than a
decade ago in which I said, what happened to Adam
Smith and the idea of the division of labor? That a sensible thing
to do would be to say, I'm not going to make everybody,
particularly people not as educated as the people
in this room, experts on financial planning
and financial investments and, you know, and
certainly what I'd do in my own medical care. My expert advice is don't get
old, nothing good comes of it. But what I do it with respect to
my medical care is I spend not a minute becoming an expert on
whatever my current malady is . I spend a lot of time
figuring out who is. So when I had spine
surgery two years ago, I'm not going to tell him
how to do the surgery. But I am going to make sure
that I found absolutely the best person to do this. So if anybody needs spine
surgery, I can give you a clue. KAREN MAY: So we've had a teaser
into your next book as well. JEFFREY PFEFFER: There you go. KAREN MAY: I'm
conscious many of you are going to rush to
two o'clock meetings, and I'm going to stop us
now so that those of you who didn't get a signed book
beforehand and want to can get one now at
the back of the room. And thank you so
much, and primarily Jeff, thank you so much
for being with us today. JEFFREY PFEFFER: Thank you. It was a pleasure meeting you. Thank you. KAREN MAY: And you. [APPLAUSE]
