Since Huggy Rao wrote Scaling Up Excellence in 2014 with co-author Bob Sutton, they have been deluged with stories about how organizations stymie and exasperate their executives, front-line employees, customers, and so many others.
The beleaguered people who we teach, participate in our research, and reach out to us often provide disturbing details. They explain how getting smart and necessary things done where they work requires convoluted, unnecessary, time-consuming, and soul-crushing gyrations—which get worse as organizations grow, age, and become more complex. This burden distracts them from more crucial matters. It undermines their performance and creativity. And it frustrates, discourages, and exhausts them.
These unsettling lessons prompted them to launch The Friction Project. They are on a messy, multi-pronged mission to understand the causes and cures for destructive organizational friction–and when it is wise to make things harder to do.
SPEECH TOPIC: The Friction fix
Too often, organizations drive people crazy with friction, make the wrong things easy to do, and the right things hard to do. As a result, good people do bad things. Friction is like cholesterol: just as bad cholesterol destroys arteries, friction weakens initiative and collaboration. Just as good cholesterol cleans arteries, good friction can be a source of commitment building and also a speed break in decision making. We discuss how bad friction can be eliminated, and good friction be harnessed so that the right things become easier to do, the wrong things hard, and no one is driven crazy.
Professor Huggy Rao has published widely in the fields of management and sociology and studies the social and cultural causes of organizational change. In his research, he studies three sub-processes of organizational change: a) creation of new social structures, b) the transformation of existing social structures, and c) the dissolution of existing social structures. His recent work investigates the role of social movements as motors of organizational change in professional and organizational fields.
His latest book is Scaling Up Excellence (2014), co-authored with Bob Sutton.