It has been a rough year at work maybe I will elaborate further in another post - but maybe this post is sufficient to underscore certain tones and themes. Anyway, about a month ago, one of my colleagues sent me an email, after I told him of a few of my work-woes, suggesting that our place of employment should purchase the book called the no asshole rule. I smiled at the title, given that the place had sucked me dry and made me a miserable human being, and I bookmarked the Amazon product listing page so that I could look at it when I went home.

When I came home, I looked on LinkedIn, as a few of my invitees has accepted my invitation, and I saw a plug for the book, and a related blog post by Guy Kawasaki. It peaked my interest more, so I went to Amazon and I read an excerpt from the first chapter (or what it the introduction? I can't remember), but it felt like the book was written for me! A few days later the book arrived via UPS and I started reading it. While going through the book, reading it made me feel like I was not alone. There were other people out there tortured by assholes in their workplace, be it bosses, clients or co-workers, the net effect was the same: high turn over, low job satisfaction, and low returns for the company (among many other things). It made me feel good that I was not alone facing such problems, and that there are businesses out there that really don't take any shit from these assholes. They, in effect, have a no asshole rule - if you are one, you are out!

There were a number of tips in the book (after all it does say it is a survival guide) that made sense, and I feel like I might be able to apply to my situation. The book was fun an interesting to read, and I feel like I got something out of it - the most important of which is that there is indeed hope. I sort of which that more people, at least where I currently work, would read this and have a good self-evaluation and see that others do see them as sadistic assholes, at least when they are within the confines of the company walls. One amazing statistic is that the effect of an asshole in a group is five times greater than the effect of a positive person. This means that it takes 5 cheery people to offset one asshole. This would explain the transformation I have seen from people entering the organization from high energy social go-getters, to locked-in-your-office low energy pessimists.

Anyway - in conclusion, it is a good read, I would recommend that people buy it and read it (or get it at your local library)