HBR's 10 Must Reads Boxed Set (Updated + Expanded, 6 Books)

7

Rid Your Organization of Obstacles That Infuriate Everyone

by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao

Editor’s note: Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao are coauthors of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), from which this article is adapted.

In August 1940, as his country prepared for waves of attacks by German planes, Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, set out to address a different enemy: lengthy reports. In his 234-word “Brevity” memo, he implored the members of his war cabinet and their staffs to “see to it that their reports are shorter.” Churchill urged them to write “short, crisp paragraphs,” to move complex arguments or statistics to appendices, and ...