Alongside Huggy Raon, 𝔹𝕠𝕓 𝕊𝕦𝕥𝕥𝕠𝕟spent seven years studying the forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations. The Friction Project is about why and when such friction is destructive, useful, or a mixed bag. Above all, it’s about how to think and live like a friction fixer, so that your team or organization doesn’t squander the zeal, damage the health, and throttle the creativity and productivity of good people—and burn through cash and other precious organizational resources.

𝔹𝕠𝕓 𝕊𝕦𝕥𝕥𝕠𝕟 will unpack how skilled friction-fixers think and act like trustees of others’ time. We provide friction forensics to help people identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. Then the help pyramid show how friction fixers do their work, which ranges from reframing friction troubles they can’t fix right now so they feel less threatening and upsetting to designing and repairing organizations.

Then he'll dig into the causes and solutions for five of the most common and damaging friction troubles. These traps are oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast and frenzied people and teams. Before wrapping things up with mental provisioning for friction-fixers, including the virtues of focusing on the journey rather than the destination, how their craft entails linking little things to big things, how skilled friction fixers get “grease” and “gunk” people in right places, how the craft is very much about “friction shifting” (knowing when to change gears from high to low friction) the power of civility, caring, and love for propelling designs and repairs, and the importance of embracing the inevitable mess that is an inevitable part of the change process (while still trying to clean it up).

𝔹𝕠𝕓 𝕊𝕦𝕥𝕥𝕠𝕟, along with colleague Hayagreeva Rao, spent the last decade working to uncover how the best leaders and organizations spread excellence: from people and places that have it, to those that don’t. 𝔹𝕠𝕓 𝕊𝕦𝕥𝕥𝕠𝕟 shows how the fate of every organization depends on building or finding pockets of exemplary performance, and—more importantly—how to spread those splendid deeds from the few to the many. Scaling well requires more than just creating a big footprint in a small amount of time—it entails developing, spreading, and preserving the right shared beliefs about which behaviors are “sacred” and which “taboo”. He shares lessons and principles that can be applied to organizations of every size and stripe: including that scaling is a problem of more and less, the power of linking hot causes to cool solutions, cut cognitive load while maintaining necessary organizational complexity, connect pockets of existing excellence and cascade them to new places, and bad is stronger than good. He ends by arguing that, under even the best conditions, scaling is always a messy and uncertain process.

𝔹𝕠𝕓 𝕊𝕦𝕥𝕥𝕠𝕟 weaves together the best psychological and management research with true stories to reveal the mindset and moves of the best bosses – which he bolsters by contrasting them with evidence on how the worst bosses think of themselves and treat their people. 𝔹𝕠𝕓 𝕊𝕦𝕥𝕥𝕠𝕟 shows how bosses can master essentials including striking just the right balance between being too assertive and not assertive and doing dirty work like disciplining and firing employees in timely and humane ways.