How can employees fight back? HP has always taken its employee surveys very seriously, especially in the days when Lew Platt was running the company. There was a boss in the '80s there who was really nasty and tended to rise in and take credit when something good happened. On her evaluations from her employees she typically received ones [1 being bad and 5 being excellent].

I don't know if you've attempted to quantify this, but has there been a rise in the number or percentage of jerks in the workplace? Or has this remained a constant? I don't know the answer to this. But there has been a dawning awareness in U.S. academia to study abusiveness in the workplace. I'm confident in saying that in Europe, the U.K. and Scandinavian countries, there is a societal and legal movement against it. And we're starting to see this in the United States.

You write about a metric called TCA, or total cost of a--holes to an organization. How did you come up with this? How does it work? This is like an open-source book. A management consultant sent me a note about the TCA concept and how expensive they can be and what the hidden costs are. I asked if he would let me publish his name and he never got back to me.

If there's one message you'd like people to take away from this book, what would it be? The reason the book is important is not just because there's a business case for it, but the reason I wanted to write the book is that we only have so many days on this planet. So if you're experiencing a life that's filled with constant abuse, you end up having a terrible life. It's just not worth putting up with that kind of abuse.