Motley Fool Money - Get Rid of the Jerks

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

When a business is looking to grow, it needs to figure out how to effectively spread excellence throughout its organization. Bob Sutton, Stanford professor and author of the book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More, Without Settling for Less, shares that one way to do that is to get rid of the jerks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, I'm Charlie Cox. Join us on Disney Plus as we talk with the cast and crew of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. What haven't you gotten to do as Daredevil? Being the Avengers. Charlie and Vincent came to play. I get emotional when I think about it. One of the great finalies of any episode we've ever done. We are going to play Truth or Daredevil.

What? Oh boy. Fantastic. You guys go hard, man. Daredevil Born Again, official podcast Tuesdays, and stream season two of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again on Disney Plus. With a monthly full money extra, I'm Chris Hill. A lot of times when we talk about smaller startup companies looking to grow,

we tend to use the same measuring stick over and over, whether it's growing overall sales or hiring more people. We often look for pure growth. But great companies are able to not only grow, but grow the best parts of their business. And in those cases, subtraction can be even more effective than addition. Bob Sutton is a professor at Stanford University and a New York Times best-selling author. Last year I got the chance to talk with Bob in front of a live audience about his book,

Scaling Up Excellence, Getting to More Without Settling for Less. And when companies are looking to scale up, getting rid of their bad parts is more important than you might think. There's a famous management book, some you may have heard of, I think the best selling of all time, perhaps good to great by Jim Collins. So our mantra is it's the opposite. It's bad to great. So when you look at situations where you want to spread something good, the first order of business is to get rid of bad stuff.

And if you want to go to some of the basic social psychology, you kind of think of some of the elements of your life. First of all, let's start with your personal relationships, because that's a good place to start. There's great long-term studies that show that the studies happen to be of long-term heterosexual married couples, but I think this works for everybody, that if you go below five to one,

so every time you have a bad interaction with your partner, you don't make it up with one good interaction, things aren't going to last. So just as somebody who's been married and living with the same woman, like virtually forever, as soon as I heard that research, I say to myself, if I've been bad, I have to be good five times in a row.

So that five to one rule is very powerful. And then the other sort of finding, more in the workplace, is there's good evidence in a small team, if you've got a deadbeat, a jerk, if you've got one person like that in your team, it brings down the effectiveness of your team by 30 or 40 percent. There's two reasons.

One is bad behavior is really contagious. The other one, and just, so maybe, maybe some of you have a bad team member in your team right now. What tends to happen is you spend more time dealing with that difficult person and less time actually doing the work. So if we fast forward to sort of scaling, situations, if you look at what some of the most effective scalers do, we were talking about last night at dinner, Carlos Brito, who's the CEO of InBev, which has bought virtually every

beer company in the world just about now, Budweiser, Stella, and so on, his perspective is the first order of businesses to get rid of the bad stuff so you can make way for the good stuff. So yeah, so bad is stronger than good. And good is wonderful, but a little bit of bad can ruin a lot of good. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.