Are You an A**hole?

Apologies, I don’t mean to offend anyone… but there’s no other way to refer to Stanford Prof. Bob Sutton’s book, “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t“.  

The Harvard Business School Press refused to publish it, unless the title was changed to something more decent – so Prof. Sutton walked away.  Ironically, now it’s the Harvard Business School Tech Alumni and my friend Chris Yeh who organizes a lunch discussion with Bob Sutton today, which I’m looking forward to.

Reading Bob Sutton’s blog I feel we’re witnessing a “No Asshole Cult” in the making.  People contribute with stories, the “Rules of Engagement” are being adopted by businesses… etc. 

My suggestion to Professor Sutton: open up the discussion even further by opening the No Assholes Wiki. The most recent example of a book being extended to a wiki is the Wikinomics Playbook where the public you and me …) gets to write an entire chapter.   I tend to agree with Ross that sooner or later “peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common“.  Considering the level of interest, this book would be a prime candidate to be wikified.

And now we’re getting to the title of this post: the button on the left takes you to the ARSE test.  “The purpose of this self-test is to find-out if you are a certified asshole, at risk of becoming one, or a genuinely civilized person.”

Personally I find this the weakest self-assessment test I’ve ever seen – unless it was meant to be just a “prank” … a joke to see who wants to claim to be an a**hole.  Self-assessment test are supposed to be constructed in a way that there are no clearly “good” and “bad” answers; the questions should be less direct so participants don’t feel inclined to answer the way they “should” behave: in other words since there is no easily recognizable, clear correlation to individual questions and the end result, they might as well answer honestly.

All the questions in the Arse test have a decidedly negative connotation, so you clearly know their impact on the final outcome. Now, doesn’t that mean that real a**holes will always click on “false” and come out with the best grades?

Update (1/8): After writing this I’ve found these stats: so far over 8000 people completed the test, yesterday’s average score was 7.29 which means:  “5 to 15 “True”: You sound like a borderline certified asshole, perhaps the time has come to start changing your behavior before it gets worse.”

I guess people want to appear assholes

Update (1/9):  Guy Kawasaki shows the current distribution chart on his blog.