Effective Uses of Profanity

I think most of us would agree that profanity in business communication usually is not a good thing. Not everyone would agree. Robert Sutton is an engineering professor at Stanford, and he has a new book out called The No Asshole Rule. His blog has a great management metric for assessing yourself and your colleagues that demonstrates several things. First, sometimes a certain word (in this case, asshole) can have an impact where no lesser word (such as jerk) would do. Second, non-verbal communication can be very powerful in ways that words cannot. The system he describes allows communication without interrupting the speaker.