Emails that drone on and on. Meetings that could have been Slack messages. Memos loaded with empty jargon. We’re all familiar with friction, or what Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao describe as “forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done.”

In their new book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), Sutton (a professor of organizational behavior, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and professor emeritus of management science and engineering at Stanford) and Rao (a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford GSB) offer a wealth of advice on identifying and removing troublesome friction—while implementing the helpful kind. Here are some tips for aspiring “friction fixers.”

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