Robert Sutton, Stanford Professor and Book Author

Organizations that learn from their failures forgive and remember, they don’t forgive and forget.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and a Professor of Organizational Behavior (by courtesy) at Stanford University, where he has been teaching classes on the psychology of business and management since 1983. Especially dear to his heart is the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, which everyone calls “the Stanford d.school.” He is a co-founder of this program, which teaches, practices, and spreads “design thinking.”

Sutton studies innovation, leadership, evidence-based management, the links between knowledge and organizational action, workplace civility, and scaling up excellence. He has published over 100 articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals and the popular press. Sutton’s books include Weird Ideas That Work, The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffrey Pfeffer), and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense (with Jeffrey Pfeffer). His last two books, The No Asshole Rule and his current book Good Boss, Bad Boss, are both New York Times bestsellers. His new book (with Huggy Rao),Scaling-Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less, appeared in 2014).

Sutton’s honors include the award for the best paper published in the Academy of Management Journal in 1989, the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the award for the best article published in the Academy of Management Review in 2005. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense was selected as the best business book of 2006 by the Toronto Globe and Mail. Sutton was named as one of 10 “B-School All-Stars” by BusinessWeek in 2007, “professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond academia.” Sutton is a Fellow at IDEO and is an academic director of three Stanford executive programs: Leading for Strategic Execution, Customer-Focused Innovation, and a new online Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate. His blog is Work Matters, at www.bobsutton.net and he tweets at @work_matters.

Roberts tags of interest: design thinking, organizational change, leadership, noasshole, innovation, evidence-based management