Robert I. Sutton

Robert I. Sutton is a Stanford Professor, organizational researcher, and best-selling author. He is a faculty fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Behavioral, and a founding advisor at Glean’s Work AI Institute. He studies leadership, innovation, organizational change, and workplace dynamics. Sutton has published over 200 articles, chapters, and case studies in scholarly and applied outlets. His main focus over the past decade is on scaling and leading at scale—how to grow organizations, spread good things (and remove bad things) in teams and organizations, and enhance performance, innovation, and well-being in organizations as they become larger, more complex, and older. Sutton has published eight books and three edited volumes. These include The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffrey Pfeffer), Weird Ideas That Work, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense (with Jeffrey Pfeffer), The No Asshole Rule (A New York Times bestseller), Good Boss, Bad Boss (A New York Times bestseller), Scaling-Up Excellence (with Huggy Rao, a Wall Street Journal bestseller) and The Asshole Survival Guide. Sutton and Huggy Rao’s latest book is The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder (St. Martin’s Press). It unpacks insights from their a seven-year project that used academic research, case studies, classes and workshops, and ongoing dialog with scholars, executives, and innovators to learn how smart organizations remove bad friction and inject good friction and do it without driving employees and customers crazy. In March 2027, Sutton will publish The 20th Anniversary Edition of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.