The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder
Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao, longtime Stanford researchers on organizational behavior, turn their attention to the everyday drag that makes work harder than it has to be. They distinguish between bad friction that exhausts people for no reason and good friction that slows them down before consequential decisions. Drawing on years of fieldwork with companies, hospitals, schools, and government agencies, they show how leaders identify jargon monoxide, addition sickness, broken connections, and the hidden taxes that pile up over time. The authors offer specific tools, including friction audits and subtraction projects, that teams can use to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. The book treats organizational friction as a craft, not a slogan.
What you might want to know about The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A field guide to the friction that makes organizations slow, exhausting, and stupid, and to the leaders who reduce it on purpose.
Yes. Grant provided a St. Martin's Press cover blurb describing Sutton and Rao as masters of practical organizational science and has highlighted the book on his newsletter and social channels as essential reading on workplace design.
It picks up themes from their earlier collaboration, but the focus here is specifically on the friction that makes organizations harder to run, and how to redesign it deliberately.
The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder was written by Robert I. Sutton, published in 2024 by St. Martin's Press.
The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.