Recommended reads summer 2025: The friction project by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao
Schroders is pleased to be partnering with the Financial Times for a third year in 2025 to celebrate the world’s best business books. Here Pablo Riveroll picks out a gem that made the 2024 long-list.
Authors
As a former student of Professor Huggy Rao, reading The Friction Project, co-authored with Robert Sutton, felt like a return to Stanford with a familiar message: not all friction in an organization is bad. The authors draw a line between good friction – beneficial pauses or checkpoints that improve decisions – and bad friction – needless bureaucratic steps that drain time. Rao always taught that effective leaders eliminate the bad while protecting the good.
Another powerful idea is our tendency to solve problems by adding more, something the authors dub “addition sickness.” When things go wrong, the instinct is to introduce a new process, tool, or layer of approval. The Friction Project shows how this impulse can backfire by creating complexity and slowing everyone down. Professor Rao challenged us to consider "smart subtraction" instead – the best fix is to remove an unnecessary step or simplify a clumsy process. That resonates for employees in many sectors, who see new committees or hierarchies bog them down where a simpler solution would have sufficed.
The most impactful theme is that leaders must be stewards of others’ time. Professor Rao stressed that a manager’s job is to shield the team from pointless tasks and meetings. The book reinforces this “trustee of time” mindset: scrutinize our calendars, cut redundant meetings, streamline approvals, and remember that every minute spent fighting bureaucracy is a minute lost to real work.
The book is full of stories – like a tech company’s purge of recurring meetings – that drove me to reflect on our own industry. Those examples make it clear that in a large asset management company, efficiency is essential – not just a buzzword – and it challenges us to identify where bad friction wastes time while recognizing that some friction (like a well-placed check list before making an investment) can be valuable.
The Friction Project reads like advice from a trusted mentor. The tone is warm and conversational – like Professor Rao in person – but the message is urgent. It offers a framework and a clear call to action: become “friction fixers” who make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. It’s a timely reminder that leadership isn’t just about strategy; it’s about smoothing the path so others can do their best work.
I’m glad to see these ideas reaching a wider audience and hopeful we can thrive by embracing them.
The friction project: how smart leaders make the right things easier and the things harder by Robert I Sutton and Huggy Rao. Published by Penguin, January 2024