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Robert Sutton, a respected Stanford University professor, is a gentleman and a scholar. But that isn't stopping him from making liberal use of an unprintable vulgarity to kick off his new campaign to jerk-proof the American workplace.

Sutton, 52, a management-science and engineering professor, says he's not trying to offend anyone with the blunt title of his book, out this week, "The No ---hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't."

But he felt he needed to use an "emotionally authentic" term to spur corporate America to stamp out boorish behavior that hurts productivity, drives away talented workers and destroys morale.

"I am disgusted with the norm in business and sports that if you are a really big winner, you can get away with being a creep," Sutton said.

For getting away with being profane, Sutton owes a debt of gratitude to retired Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, who penned a best-selling book in 2005 on the Platonic essence of bull manure. "It opened up the market for books with dirty titles for professors from fancy universities," Sutton said.

He was familiar with the vast academic research into workplace bullying, but it wasn't until he used a profane word in a much-discussed Harvard Business Review essay that he realized the gut-level resonance it had with people. So he refused to go with a publisher who would insist on cleaning up his language. "This is language that people will remember and spread," he said.

Sutton has received hundreds of e-mails and as many faithful visitors to his blog, all with nightmarish tales of suffering at the hands of mean bosses or co-workers. About 2,000 promotional erasers from his publisher, Warner Business Books, quickly became hot commodities in his campaign to rub out jerks at work.

That campaign is making him something of a bookish, bespectacled rock star in Silicon Valley, where companies from Google to eBay to Yahoo, trying to create worker-friendly cultures, have invited Sutton to give talks on the subject.

Silicon Valley certainly can lay claim to its share of outrageous accounts of brilliant but brutish technocrats mercilessly torturing their employees. Sutton uses Steve Jobs as the poster boy for a concessionary chapter on "The Virtues of ---holes."

But Sutton says there's an unmistakable groundswell of support for his struggle to create a kinder, gentler workplace— particularly at a time when the war for talent is once again in high gear.

Lars Dalgaard, 39, CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based SuccessFactors and a major player in the rough-elbowed world of business software, identifies himself as a recovering Fortune 500 jerk. He realized as a young general manager that such toxic people hinder performance. So he explored more effective and humane ways to deliver results and hit financial targets.

Now he's famous for mandating a strict no-jerk rule at his 475-employee company. Job interviews are long and feature questions designed to uncover any browbeating tendencies. Last year he took candidates vying for the job of chief financial officer to lunch at a restaurant to see how they treated the waitstaff. Some got a free lunch but nothing more.

About a half-dozen entrepreneurs have told Sutton they enforce a no-jerk rule when hiring and firing, he said.

Sutton defines a jerk as one who oppresses, humiliates, de-energizes or belittles a subordinate or a colleague. Tactics include personal insults, sarcasm, teasing, shaming or treating people as if they were invisible. He distinguishes between "temporary" jerks, those with the potential to act like jerks but who don't do so all the time; and "certified" jerks, who are routinely nasty.

Certified jerks are the ones who pose the greatest threat to an organization's culture. Sutton then explores ways to implement a no-jerk rule and how to survive an environment that doesn't have one.

He also warns organizations that being a jerk is contagious. Hire one, and you'll soon have plenty polluting the work environment.