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.
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
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
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