MEdia: 🏗️Constructive Friction vs. Corporate Toxicity☣️
The only ass you should want on your team. 📷 Noah Holm - Unsplash
When I left my first real tech gig, a colleague handed me a parting gift: The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton. Happy trails to you until we meet again, Larry. (Props to Bob for still rocking a .net domain). At the time, I had the naive, early-career delusion that corporate toxicity was isolated.
I was wrong. The corporate machine is crawling with them like bugs in the code. You never know where they are going to pop up. And there’s a good chance it will ruin your day.
Two people admiring The Temptations of Christ - 📷 Alistar MacRoberts - Unsplash
You know the type: the operators who punch down, kiss up, and happily use your spine as a ladder rung. Worse, plenty of VC-backed, growth-at-all-costs organizations actively reward this behavior. Over two decades in high-stakes rise-and-grind places, I’ve developed a bloodhound’s nose for them.
I recently re-read Sutton’s manifesto alongside his follow-up, Good Boss, Bad Boss, as a sanity check while laying the foundation of Tenn. Cent. It was a necessary reminder that money at any cost can cost you everything. If I only cared about lining my pockets, I’d be on your phone right now pitching a "digital transformation" fueled by half-baked AI agents designed to gut your headcount. Then I’d be sipping an umbrella drink on a beach while your operations cratered under the massive pile of shit I left baking in the sun on your balance sheet.
But I’m cursed with a conscience. I prefer to sleep through the night.
I can attribute much of management style to those two books. I highly recommend both of them and intend to read Scaling Up Excellence soon as another block in the foundation.
The Engineering Rigor of "Good Friction"
My biggest takeaway from Sutton’s work is the concept of constructive friction. In systems engineering, friction is usually the enemy. But in organizational architecture, you have to know the difference between the noise and the signal:
Bad Friction: Bureaucratic drag, personal hostility, performative power plays, and endless, soul-sucking consensus meetings. Are we all in agreement? 🤮 As the saying goes: a camel is a horse designed by committee.
Good Friction: Unforgiving intellectual debate that aggressively challenges assumptions to prevent a catastrophic production failure. That being said Progress > Perfection. Don’t argue over the place settings if there is a hole in the boat. See also Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO.
Some of the most elegant, resilient system designs I’ve ever worked on didn't start with passive corporate agreement. They started as a jabbing match of ideological improv. Not "yes, and"—but "yes, but." I have watched engineers spend two hours locked in a room tearing into how a variable or a class was named in the codebase turn into the evolution of a subsystem. To an outsider, it looks like bike-shedding. To an auditor, it’s intellectual jazz. It’s a way that ideas are decomposed and built better in each iteration.
This isn't just management theory; it’s a proven law of physics. I first caught wind of this in Adrian Bejan’s Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organizations. It’s the only textbook I’ve ever read for pure entertainment. The core thesis? The Constructal Law: For a finite flow system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the currents that flow through it. It is the arrow of time, the direction of the evolution of flow organization.
Corporate toxicity chokes that flow. Good friction optimizes it.
Argue in the studio. Together on stage.
All together now 📷 Michał Franczak - Unsplash
One of the best operational strategies I ever picked up came from watching non-profit boards navigate structural chaos. Behind closed doors, the directors can fight, argue, and dismantle bad logic until the truth is exposed. The moment you step out of the room on to the public stage, you bang the same drum.
That is exactly how an execution engine handles directives. As Bob quotes “Talk like you’re right. Listen like you’re wrong.” And once the system parameters are locked in, everyone executes wholeheartedly with zero ego. Ego is an organizational parasite.
If your organization thrives, everyone inside it thrives. And if there is a single operational bottleneck standing in the way of that growth, it’s an asshole. Eliminate them from the stack. The person standing on your neck isn’t going to help you up.
