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Subtraction Tool Kit

Subtraction Tool Kit

Unclog Your Organization

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Welcome

Unclog Your Organization

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What is the Subtraction Toolkit?

Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao developed this site to help people build teams and organizations embrace and live “the subtraction mindset” —to find and and remove things that were  once useful, but are now now in the way, that adds needless friction,  and scatters people attention. It contains a collection of useful subtraction tools that leaders and teams can consider and try to figure out what works best from them, and other useful resources such as books and articles on subtraction. This website is part of Sutton and Rao’s friction project, their quest to understand what organizations ought to make harder, what they ought to make easier, and how to make that happen without driving people crazy.  This project follows from their book Scaling Up Excellence and is the basis of the book they are writing now, tentatively titled The Friction Fix.

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Huggy Rao

Professor Rao studies collective action within organizations and in markets. His research and by implication, his teaching, revolves around scaling up mobilization, innovation, and talent in organizations.

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Robert I. Sutton

Robert Sutton is an organizational psychologist, Stanford Professor, and a New York Times bestselling author of seven books including  The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffery Pfeffer), The No Asshole Rule, Scaling Up Excellence (with Huggy Rao), and Good Boss, Bad Boss.

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Our Top 7 Lists

Great Books

  • Sludge: What Stops Use From Getting Things Done and What to Do About It
  • No Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
  • In Pursuit of Elegance: Why The Best Ideas Have Something Missing
  • Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less
  • Parkinson’s Law: And Other Studies in Administration
  • Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
  • Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life
More Books

Key Articles

  • This Weekly Meeting Took Up 300,000 Hours a Year
  • The Patients vs. Paperwork Problem for Doctors
  • The fractal structure of communities of practice: Implications for business organization
  • How the ‘Ikea effect’ subtly influences how you spend
  • Reinventing Performance Management
  • The Overcommitted Organization
  • Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff
More Articles

Stuff We Love

  • Less is More: Why Our Brains Struggle to Subtract
  • Advice from the CIA: How to Sabotage Your Workplace
  • The #1 bug predictor is not technical, it’s organizational complexity
  • Memo FROM: Winston Churchill, TO: The War Cabinet, RE: Brevity, DATE: 08/09/1940)
  • Patrick Collison’s Fast List
  • Automatic jargon identifier for scientists engaging with the public and science communication educators
  • Double Hip Replacement
More Stuff

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