Don't be an asshole

I did a brief treatment of the new Robert Sutton book (via an article from McKinsey Quarterly) The No Asshole Rule over at Sanctioning Agent. It reminded me of our comments policy here on ASS, only the book is from a Stanford business prof and has an index for the total cost of assholes.

Assholes are just plain bad for business and organizations. What's worse? They're contagious. Kind of like Buck in Call of the Wild -- in bad circumstances, even the best Yukon Territory dog can go bad. The asshole index seems incredibly high with the Dubbya admin. I wonder how many in the regime would embrace the following in debate or dialoge?

To paraphrase a primary theme in Karl Weick’s classic book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, this approach means learning to “argue as if you are right and to listen as if you are wrong.”