Thursday, April 1, 2010

Good Boss Bad Boss

Prof Bob Sutton's new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst, published by the Hachette Group, is scheduled to hit the stands in September 2010. He talks about it in his latest blog post, I Think Bloggers Matter at Lot, But Blurbs Don't Matter Much for Creating Buzz: What is Your Opinion? - Bob Sutton

Looking forward to reading it. I read, and gifted one copy, of his previous book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't Come to think of it, I must write a review of the book. Haven't done so, even three years after having read the book.

Isn't being a boss so much about the power trip also? The initial rush of being 'on top' is such that we so often forget that being a boss is a means to an end. The end being helping the company and the people under you perform to the best of their potentials. But when promotions happen to the undeserving, when bosses gone bad are allowed to run amok, when otherwise good, competent people are promoted beyond their competence, and then allowed to operate at that level, it poisons the whole atmosphere at a company. It dis-illusions the employees, motivates the assholes among them, and an air of cynicism starts to creep in. If excellent programmers are said to be ten times as productive as the average programmer, I would submit that an awesome boss is worth 100 times an average manager. And a bad boss can drive away, literally, hundreds of good people from the company.

Enough said.

© 2010, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.