The No Asshole Rule :-)

Hey, don't blame me for the title for this post; it is the title of a book :-) The full title is: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. The author is Robert Sutton, who is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School.

I was reading this essay on "Defending Collegiality", which was triggered by The No Asshole Rule, where I found a reference to an article on collegiality. So, of course, I followed-up on that. I liked that essay by Linda Hutcheon, who is a University Professor of Literature at the University of Toronto. I liked these sentences the best:

At stake here is more than the quality of our daily communal life; what we see ourselves doing as professionals is affected. We are critical thinkers; we value dissent. But must rigorous critical thinking be reduced to its simplest and easiest form: attack and destroy? We treasure subtlety in other things, why not here? We know from observing the political realm that destructive disputation does not require careful and serious listening, reading, or even thinking. If we do choose to listen, read, and think with care, we might see what we share as well as where we differ. If we make fewer assertions and ask more questions, there may be more room for an intellectual form of collegiality. We need to feel more comfortable entertaining others’ positions on any given topic without thinking ourselves less rigorous for that. In other words, there is value to entering imaginatively another’s claim rather than simply opposing it. To reject out of hand is to fail intellectually: it is simply too easy.

I suppose the audience I would like to target here, and remind them about Hutcheon's remarks, will never be subscribers to this blog :-)