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Frances Frei: From Problems to Progress- Bold Leadership in Action · The Bold Lounge

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge Podcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My name is Lee Burgess and I will be your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: This podcast is all about those kinds of stories.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Every week, we'll hear from someone who has taken a leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Whether they face challenges or douse along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be freed.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Tune in and get ready to be inspired.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Today I have Frances Frye.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: She is a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Her research investigates how leaders create the conditions for organizations, individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations and culture.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: She has also written Move Fast and Fix Things, which we are going to jump into this book and have some fun talking about strategy and all the research that she has done.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Additionally, she has a TED talk that has over 6.3 million views at this point, as all about trust and rebuilding trust.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Welcome, frances.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Oh, thank you so much.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: We are delighted to be here, so we're going to jump right in.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: We had a fun pre-talk and we're going to jump right into being bold, so I wonder what Frances feels the definition of bold is.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: What does bold look like in your world?
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: So I think bold there is an element of jumping off a cliff.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: So bold is not continuous, it's a discontinuous leap and it's doing it in the service of something far greater than ourselves.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: So when are we willing to like totally go there without a complete safety net, in service of someone else?
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: That, to me, is bold.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: That's excellent.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: So I think what's interesting in there is you didn't say fearless.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Oh goodness, fearless is so overrated.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: How do we act in the presence of fear?
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: That's what we should talk about.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: Fearless means you're not going to have a very interesting life.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Right, most likely.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're going to be very comfortable all the time.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: That's pretty boring yeah.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: So when was the first time, based on your definition, that you remember being bold?
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, my earliest memories.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: I grew up I'm a woman of a certain age, so grew up, and they were pretty gendered roles and I did not conform to gendered roles from the get go, and so I think that I, without any other role models, I was constantly jumping off a cliff, whether it was within my own family unit or within my neighborhood, and so the vivid memories that come to mind are the summers.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: I grew up in a summer town, but I was a year-long resident, so it would be in the summers when there would be an influx of people that would come in, and every summer was an exercise in boldness for me, when the onslaught of people that were pretty sure they understood how the boys were supposed to behave and how the girls were supposed to behave, and I was uninterested in conforming to that, and it felt bold every summer.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of a hard place to be, in the sense of you have your home, your space, kind of your safety right.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Lots of people consider their home, where they feel safe or accepted when you're in a town like that and I think of that.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: We go to the outer banks every summer and we've always thought about living there, and then I'm like I just don't know if I can handle it.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't live there in the summer, I'd go somewhere else, because that's the people coming in and they think I don't know like it feels like times, like there's not respect, there isn't understanding.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: You know, I can imagine that it's.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: I didn't find it disrespectful, I just found it old fashioned, okay.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: So I think sometimes, when we have this quaint view of when we're going to go and do something in the summer, we're not necessarily thinking in a progressive way.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: We might just be thinking in an old fashioned way.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: Okay, okay.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so you were yourself.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: You continued to be you regardless and continue to be bold every summer that this would happen.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: Every summer, and then the summers just became all year.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Then it's like, hey, I'm going to be me full time.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: So, as you thought about your bold journey, kind of coming through all the things that you've done throughout your career, I mean, you took on a pretty bold role at Uber.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Can we talk about that?
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Yes, if you had asked me what was the most recent example, I probably would have said Uber, because that was jumping without a net.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: I mean, I left the Harvard Business School, which, if you're- lucky enough to have.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're lucky enough to have tenure there, not a lot of people would voluntarily leave, but I saw a situation that I thought I could be helpful and if we could solve it, so many other companies that were having struggles that weren't as bad would know, would have a recipe for how to fix them.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: So, you know, I spend my life trying to open source, how to improve things, going to Uber and participating in it, and it was a pretty extreme example that I think it was very bold in terms of the without a net, because I had never done something like that before and I was doing it in service of others.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: I used to joke that the only way I would leave Harvard is if I went to prison, and you know it sounds alarming, but the reason I would say that is that I never thought I would leave Harvard.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: So I think it does qualify as bold.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so what was for me like one of the things I really really enjoy doing, which I don't know there's probably some genetic piece to it, I don't know, but I really do like coming into things that are on fire or are really a mess.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Or you know, whether I come in and I'm the calming force, or I come in I'm like the logical force, or I'm coming in and just saying time out, we can figure this out.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think about the work that Ann and I do my wife and I and it's part of it is firefighting, and that's what you're saying and that's what I did when I went to Uber and I have to say, the sense of urgency when there is a fire is urgency is so powerful.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: In fact, one of the reasons we wrote this book is to help people have a faster metabolic rate when it's not an urgency, when it's not an urgent situation.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: So half of our work is firefighting.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: It used to be more than half.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: Half is now fire prevention.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: But one of the biggest things we have to do to fire prevention is to provide the motivation to act urgently, because when it's fire prevention, you can wait till tomorrow.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: When it's firefighting.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: You can't wait until tomorrow and that momentum, I think, is an enormously powerful accelerant.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was always frustrating, I think, in any environment I've been in, when there was a situation that came up that was preventable, and we knew it was preventable, but we didn't actually do what we needed to do or invest what we needed to invest or take the time.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: So the fact that you focus on both ends of that spectrum, where, yes, if there's a fire we'll fight it, but let's actually prevent it, which is definitely the better way to be, and it's also it's not preventing it and standing still, it's preventing it and adding a zero.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: So what I do is organizations that are doing very well, but they want to scale dramatically and they want to be doing it much better for many more people and they want to not catch fire along the way, and that's what we do.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love what you said there about the.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: I wrote the business metabolic rate so like really thinking about change and pushing forward things faster than they normally would move, if we, you know, sometimes I just don't know why things take as long as they do when we know there's an issue.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: So when you wrote about this book, there is a sense of risk to move fast.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: There is a sense of you know, large organizations or any size organizations may feel that there's too much risk in moving fast.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah Well, and I you know they got that in part from the move fast and break things ethos, which was very compelling to the world.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: And they said look, you can either move fast and break things or else go slow one or the other, so you can either move fast or take care of people.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: And everybody believed them.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: They believed that those are the two choices.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: We find that there's a third way.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: So it, if you're only stuck with those two choices, I like people going slowly, yeah it's true, we don't want to break anybody or anything.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: But we have found that you can move fast and fix things the name of the book so we can, we don't have to break things along the way.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: And so if you in our five day week, five day week metaphor of how to fix things, you don't go fast until Friday, but so you have to do speed in sequence, but if you do, you're not going to break things along the way, and I actually find it's, it's quite inhumane in the presence of problems to go slow because you know you are having some people suffering and yet you choose to go slow.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: I'm deeply in touch with that form of inhumanity.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so the empathetic side of our leadership really should be in tune.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: It shouldn't let us go as slow as we go.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: I think at your point out of fear, we call it responsible stewardship, that form of moving slow, and I get it.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: But we're trying to provide the secret memo of how to go faster, because that metabolic rate in the, in the face of problems that are affecting people, it's actually an unkind thing to do to go so slowly.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, or the people we serve.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: So, like I, I'm in healthcare, so I think, like we have no time, people need us to like be at our best, at our highest, and obviously as an organization, we need to be efficient and productive and profitable.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: But you know, there is a space for us to go faster.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: I always felt like that, but I think, as a leader, sometimes it felt like a bumped against a lot of stuff?
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: Well, it does, and I think that's why you know, that's why we wrote the book, is that it was to to show people how to do it.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: I think it was not well understood how you could move fast and not break things.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: And so we tried to open source it, and that's the whole purpose of the book.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so can you give an example like of an organization that did move fast and it didn't hinder them but actually helped them excel?
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: Oh goodness, yeah, yeah.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: So I mean once you, once you start sampling on who has had great success, who has been able to do to change effectively, you will never come across someone who says you know what I wish I had taken longer, that's for sure.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: You'll also never cross across someone who says you know what I wish I had done less?
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: And yet we are trying to entice one another to go slower and do less all the time.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: So it's quite a paradox in my mind of how those prescriptions have never been helpful and yet we offer them to one another in a near constant way.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: But so organizations that move fast I mean Uber, I think is a great example.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: We were able to fix the culture at Uber very quickly.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: I would argue if we took any longer, we would not have been able to do it.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: Ralph Emerson has a beautiful metaphor that he uses.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: He's like when you're on thin ice, don't slow down, you got to keep going.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: Well, I think change is thin ice.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: Don't slow down.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Your momentum is actually what's powerful.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: So, when you think about one of the things that happens and it is a big part of what you do and what you've researched and what your expertise is really around building trust some people think that building trust takes a long time.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a myth.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: And once it's broken you can never rebuild it Another myth, right, yeah?
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: So I think if someone's out there going, okay, well, I'm a newer leader or someone that's come into an organization and purposefully, most likely hired because they have a different set of eyes.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they might have to rebuild trust that someone else broke Broke Right, yeah.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: So what are some tips about someone coming in with that that is their kind of call.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: So what is I would encourage people to have?
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: Can do spirit.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: We lovingly refer to it as can do lesbian spirit, thinking that everybody has an inner lesbian, which is, you know that person who, if you get a flat tire on the highway and you pull off to the side, some people in the car are going to call you know AAA, and other people are going to go around and get the jack out.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: And they're the lesbians.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: That's who you want, the can doers.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: You want the can doers, you want that can do spirit.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: So I would say have you the can do spirit and realize that it's fixable.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: But an accurate diagnosis is needed.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: So what we know about trust is it breaks for only one of three reasons, and we've seen this in literally hundreds of thousands of examples and we've never found a fourth reason.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: I look forward to there being a fourth reason, because I can move on from the trust triangle to a trust more interesting shape Anything square or rectangle.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: parallel, again rhombus.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: Like you could see I'm ready.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: I'm ready for that fourth thing.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: So far, no luck.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: But so trust always breaks down for one of three reasons.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: You will either not trust me because you're not experiencing my authenticity, my logic or my empathy.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: Those are the three parts of it.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: So the first thing to do is to diagnose which one is getting in the way and then focus your prescription on overcoming that.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: And a lot of the work.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: When people say it takes a really long time to rebuild trust, it's because they're using a logic prescription on an authenticity problem, for example and they're not even, they don't even have the clarity that there's, oh, there's only three forms, but they're saying, oh, I did this before, so I'm going to do it here when you did it before, but it was a different issue and so, without really understanding the underlying engineering of the problem, you can easily waste time.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: In fact, you will far more likely have inefficient time.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: But when you know one of three things, I know how to do the diagnosis.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: Once I have the diagnosis, okay, and now what are the prescriptions at my disposal?
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: Then it happens really quickly and you can rebuild trust.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: You've had a situation where you know, let's say, an organization has lost trust, you're an united customer and they and they lost your guitar or they or they did whatever, and you lose trust with them.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Well, an amazing, an amazing remedy.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: If they came back and were like, oh my gosh, I'm sorry, and here's what we're going to do, they can earn back that trust and then some.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: And so this, this notion we have sold people, that trust, is a faberge egg.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: It's false.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: It's not that it breaks into a million pieces never to be repaired again.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: We can actually repair it to at least the strength that it once was, but you need to have the secret memo on how to do it.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: You need to know the specific engineering schematic of it.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: Fortunately, that's super well understood now.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Can a good communicator versus a bad communicator mean someone that doesn't know how to communicate?
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Can they still have the same results using the formula Well?
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: communication allows us to at least get the return on our efforts.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: So if you're, all things being equal, if you're a good communicator and I'm a bad communicator, you're going to be better off.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: So I think communication is a way to like let's say you have a strategy, you're, and you can't communicate well, then you're not going to be able to implement that strategy well.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: But if you have a strategy and you can communicate well, so the communication allows you to get the full return on your strategy.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: So that's how I look at communication.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: It allows you to get 100% fidelity of everything else when you do it well.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: But if you can't do it well, then that limits what everything else can do.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: It limits the upside of everything else.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so maybe this is where, if you're aware, you could use members of your team to help you.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the peripheral vision and the extra ideas.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: And so if we think about the book, on Tuesday we solve for trust, but on Wednesday we make new friends and so members of your team and maybe members of other teams right, and you go and find other people and then Thursday is storytelling day to your communication part.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: So I think all of your ideas are really good and they're very systematic in how you lay them out.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, one of the parts with the storytelling which I thought was interesting in the book is you're not always going to be hitting it in other parts.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: You're not always hitting it in other parts and everything that you're trying.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: So you're going to have some people who are really working hard, who are high performers, who feel defeated.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: So being able to tell the journey and some of the things is very, very important, I think, as leaders sometimes we try to skip Thursday, sometimes we we skip it.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: We're still not there.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: We're still not there.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: No, it's Thursday.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: I find when people are really pressed for time, thursday is the most common day to skip.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: They're thinking I'll do everything else and I'll get the plan really good.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: I don't think really hard about how to communicate it.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: And here's the thing about communication it not only works when I'm in your presence, but it guides me on what I should do in your absence.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: So communication is critical.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: In fact, I'd rather you have a slightly worse plan, perfectly communicated, than a really good plan, ineffectively communicated.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: I'll thump you in that case.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so when it comes to organizations and moving faster and all your research, why don't we do it?
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: We actually want to move fast.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Well, I think part of it is because we've seen too many people move fast and break things, that is, they moved fast without first doing the proper diagnosis, solving for trust, getting the communication in line.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: So we've seen speed used ineffectively and we've made a generalizable lesson that speed is bad, speed is reckless, and speed is only reckless if you don't build trust.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: But in the presence of trust we call it actually accelerating excellence.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: And so when is it reckless and when is it accelerating goodness?
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: It's in the presence of trust.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: So I think part of it is we just we don't know how to do it.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: The other part is, particularly if we're doing well, people get very risk averse and they're like, why do anything differently?
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: So let's slowly, incrementally, tomorrow do mostly what we're doing today, and that again goes to that lack of urgency.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: But I see organizations that are in the top quartile are very reluctant to change.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: But that's where reversion to the mean comes in, like there's no reason that you have to revert to the mean, except for every time you're above average you slow down, and every time you're below average you speed up.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: And I promise you we're all going to start going towards the mean, right.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Right when you think about a fast cycle time and you talk about this in the book, can you describe that for the listeners of what that is?
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: What's a fast cycle time?
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and so, and I do that in the confine, there's this beautiful operational and I'm an operations professor, so I I love operational tenants and one of them is called little's law, and John little and MIT professor, made the observation that the amount of time anything takes equals the number of things that are in front of it and how long each thing takes.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: And how long each things takes is the cycle time and how many are in front of it.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: And so let's say that I go and I joined the queue at Starbucks and it takes the barista one minute to serve each person.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: You ever?
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: time anyone.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: While you're in line, I'm constantly timing people.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: I'm just counting in my head.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: The operational efficiency?
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Yes, I am.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: I can't turn that clock off.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: But if it takes a minute to serve everyone and I'm the 11th person in line, then it's going to take 11 minutes before I can get served.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: So I'll be in the system for 12 minutes, like that's the way that you, that you think about it, and so if we're sad about how long things are taking, we can ask the barista to speed up that cycle time, or we can remove people that are in front of us.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: That's work in process.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: So if you want to make things go faster, you actually have two levers work faster, cycle time, remove work in process.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: Most of us ask employees to work harder, we ask them to work over the weekends, we ask them to work at night, and what we should be doing is practicing radical prioritization and remove some of the people that are in line in front of them.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: So I would say that cycle time gets a disproportionate amount of attention, whereas ruthless prioritization should be taking more of the attention.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Okay, and how does someone ruthlessly prioritize?
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: By acknowledging that we can't be great at everything.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: So we have to say what are the things we're going to be better at tomorrow than we are today, and what does that mean?
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: We have to give up in order to do it.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: So I'll give you an example.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: When Steve Jobs first created the MacBook Air and I don't know if you're an Apple, a fiction auto but when he came out on stage with a Manila envelope and that happened to have that MacBook Air in it and it took the world's like breath away when he took it out Well, that computer was best in class at weight because it was worst in class at physical features.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: This will date us, but at the time it was an internal CD-Brom drive.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: So now, if you wanted to be best in class at physical features, you would be worst in class at weight.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: These things traded off against each other.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: That's what radical prioritization is is to understand what trades off against each other, because if you tried to be best in class at weight and best in class at physical features, you would end up average at both and you would exhaust yourself trying to do it, but instead say which one.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: And he was like I want to be best in class at weight and he was worst in class at physical features, and he made that decision comfortably.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: It's like in healthcare in your world, where I would see healthcare CEOs saying we're going to beat the competition on cost, quality and speed.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: I'm like, no, you're not, but you're going to try to get everyone to try and you're going to end up with exhausted mediocrity.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: Instead, acknowledge that there are trade offs amongst these things and you decide the trade off you want everyone else to implement.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really powerful and I would just want to say that again for the people in the back because I think, especially so you just said the exhausted mediocrity which I bet there's a lot of people listening that can relate to that Well yeah.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Because I think there's a lot of cyclical dysfunction that happens within organizations.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, we're solving the same problem again.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Yes, someone left, a leader came, we had a new CEO.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: Now we have the problem again and we're trying to solve it the same way.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: We've already tried to solve it.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: That's what would you know?
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: A lot of the times really frustrate me because we couldn't solve it the same way.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: And if we actually would have solved it, it wouldn't have come back and I don't think they recognize that, and I think what a lot of times this comes down to the people that were in a position to make trade offs didn't, and instead said to everyone try your best, be as good as possible on as many dimensions as you possibly can.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: It abdicate your responsibility as a leader and it guarantees that we're going to be on Groundhog Day.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and high performers usually leave that.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, they're going to totally leave that system so you're not going to be psyched with who sticks around?
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah For sure, definitely not.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: For sure there's also a sense of, when it comes to moving fast and doing some of the things, particularly in the Monday through Friday model, that as a leader, you have to be okay not being in.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: I'm just putting air quotes for everyone can't see me control, and so what is the proportion letting go to, like letting it go fast and helping it actually have the results that it could have in this model?
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Well, I think the letting it go, which is sometimes called decentralized leadership or empowerment my preferred phrase is empowerment Like how much should you empower others?
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: You should equip others to be empowered as much as possible.
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: And the Toni Morrison quote is always the one that guides me, which is once you get that power you so richly deserve, your job is to turn around and empower someone else.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: Well, that's what we want to do.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: We want to train people so that we can empower them, and the more I can empower people, the faster we can go, for the simple reason that if it all requires me, you have to wait for me every single time.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: But if I can hand it off to 10 people, they can all go parallel to one another.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: So if everything takes one unit of time, you either have to wait for me for 10 units or I can have 10 people do one unit simultaneously and it just takes one unit of time.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: So it is so much better to decentralize and to empower, but that is, it's like a toggle switch in our minds, would I like?
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: Do I want to be the perfectionist control freak, or do I have the humility to realize that others can do collectively, can do a much better job than I can do individually.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Is it possible for a unit to be within a large organization and be moving things fast and fixing them and continuing the cycle within an organization that is not?
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we call it buffer leadership.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: And so, for whatever your zone of influence is, you practice is wall off.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: So be the buffer for your team.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: And this is Marvin Ellison, who is now the CEO of Lowe's.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: But when he was a regional manager at Home Depot and he was a star performer at Home Depot and they kept giving him bigger and bigger regions, at some points in the company's history at Home Depot he was the only region doing well.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: He practiced buffer leadership.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: The team would wanted to tell his employees you have to pay attention to these 13 things.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: He was like you may grade me on those 13 things, but you may not talk to my employees.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: I will guide my employees.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: I'm going to buffer my employees from your insanity, but hold me responsible for my employees performance.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: So that's what I would say you should do is, if your rest of your organization doesn't get it, be like Marvin Ellison and be the buffer so that you protect your employees and then turn around and let them optimize and then wait till you get promoted to CEO at the competitor, because that's what's going to happen, right.
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: And here you go there you go, he's on to Lowe's.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so in your career, have you ever found a problem or a challenge that is not fixable?
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: That's such a good question.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: Hmm, for the listeners, I'm racking my brain.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: I have not, I have not.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: I would think that just in general like I don't have the vast experience and the research expertise you have, but just there is a way to figure something out, Like when you just see things that happen to you personally or professionally, like.
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: I've never seen a problem in an organization that's not fixable.
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: And I have a call in podcast called fixable, where people call in and with their challenges.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: So small challenges, big challenges I think everything's fixable.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: I think our societal problems are fixable.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: I think everything is fixable.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: I guess there is one prerequisite to being fixed.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: I will say that there's a prerequisite, which is you have to have the desire to change.
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: So the one thing I don't know how to fix is if you know things are broken and you don't want to move on from them being broken, that I don't know how to fix.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: We are not genuine and authentic in wanting to fix it.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: So if you don't have that genuineness, we can't do it.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: But if you have that, I personally can't think of a single thing that's not fixable.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: I've never come across a thing and I've worked with, you know, I had the pleasure of working with some of the world's biggest companies startups, family businesses, the whole thing.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: I've never come across something that's not fixable.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: Okay, when you think about the model of the Monday through Friday, is the phenotype of a leader anything specific, like if you would describe someone who could actually do this at the highest level?
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: No, no that's not Okay.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Anyone can do it.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: But here's the thing Whoever you are, please realize that you will naturally be attracted to people who are like you.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: We really like people who are really like us.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: So successful people override the instinct to surround themselves with people who are like them and instead surround themselves with people who are compliments to them and who are different than them and who think differently.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: So I guess the phenotype is people who are inclusive of difference.
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: They thump everyone else and our natural instinct and you can just, if you just observe yourself over the next 48 hours and watch how often you are complimenting people for saying something, you would say how like we just celebrate sameness.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: We're attracted to sameness.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: It doesn't make us bad people, it makes us human.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: It's our instinct.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: So the phenotype of great leaders is they override that instinct with the learned behavior of being inclusive of as much difference as possible, Because then you get the best.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: You get the upper envelope of all of the great ideas, as opposed to redundancy of your already good ideas.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: So, when you think about your sphere of influence and where you are in an organization and let's say you're not in a C-suite, you're not, you know, vp or SVP, but you're a manager or director.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Even you know someone who is in even a leadership role can they utilize this model to start moving faster and fixing things within their environment, in their sphere?
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: Yes, I'll speak to everyone except for the individual contributors.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: I have a separate thing to say to them.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: But if you have a team, this can work for you and your team and you can just follow it straight from Monday to Friday.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: If you are a member of a team but you don't have any formal influence, you're then going to have to adapt informal influence, and that's trickier to do, and so I would.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: What I would say there is when we think about leadership, we think leadership is about making other people better as a result of our presence.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: So how can you be a Thomas the train useful engine in the spirit of doing things better?
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: But it's it's practicing informal influence, which is its whole other thing, and that's hard.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: It's a really hard thing to do For everyone else.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: It's your formal influence is plenty.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so it's.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: It's not about your title.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: No, no, no so there is a sense of I.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: You know I hear this a lot of like.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: You know, well, I can't because I'm not in this role, or even Ellison was in a very low role when he started practicing buffer leadership.
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: It's precisely why he got to a very high role.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's no excuse.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: I guess that's how I tell everybody there's one way of saying this is there's no excuse.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: The other way of saying this is it's deeply liberating that you too can do it.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, there we go.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: That's the positive side, yeah yeah.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so when we think about certain industries that feel like going too fast could be harmful, what industry?
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: I will say just my own like pharmaceutical, we can't actually get things done faster.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: We take years and years and billions of dollars to create a vaccine and then, and yet look what just happened.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's so.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: Look at the pandemic, the highlight of a very low moment in the world Like for me, being especially in the industry, I was like why aren't we doing?
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: this all the time?
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: What I loved about that is that, look, we get into well-worn paths of thinking oh, this takes three years.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: Why do we know it took three years?
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: Because it took everyone else three years.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: That's when you need new eyes and fresh eyes and you don't want people to say can you improve that five percent or 10 percent?
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: You want the thought experiment.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: If we had to do it in one year, what would it look like?
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: You need like radical, a radical constraint to help you get it.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: Now, a crisis gives us that license.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: To me, the trick is, how do you do it in the absence of a crisis?
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, or how do you not fall back?
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Because I've even seen industries my own falling back.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: Well, this is where this is why I love competition.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: So, because not everyone's going to fall back and the ones that don't are going to win.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: And this is where I like to remove all regulations that are protecting companies from competition.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: They're going to permit us to fall back, but if you have no regulations that are protecting people from competition, so that we're all exposed to, you fall back, and I don't, I thump you.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: That's how we want markets to work.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: So, as long as they're not overly protected through greedy regulation, some will fall back and they'll be the ones that die off, and the ones that don't fall back will be the ones that win, and that's as the way it should be.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: When you think about the lessons that you've learned through writing the book and through doing all of the research, are there any that come to the top of wild?
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: That was surprising.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: It wasn't what I thought it would be or what I hypothesized.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: So I grew up as a math major and then early on in my operations management career, operations is all about optimizing, and I could optimize anything if it weren't for the pesky people.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: And so it was just right around the time I was coming up for tenure and I was like the problems I can optimize that don't have people involved in it are no longer capturing my attention.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: So I think the thing that has been most surprising to me is we have been studying leadership for thousands of years and yet we are still learning new things every single day, whereas we haven't been studying supply chains for thousands of years and we're not learning all that many new things day to day.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: So what is it about the human species that permits that?
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: It makes it so elusive from the one best practice?
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: That is super curious to me, yeah.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: So what is your current problem that you're working to solve, now that we know how to move fast and fix things Like what's next?
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: So for me.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School, which means that it's a very elite place, that only some people get to come onto campus, and my thing is I want to democratize access to everything that Ann and I know.
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: So, I am trying to reach the masses.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: I do it on LinkedIn, where I try to open source the material as much as possible.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: I put up videos, I do things the podcast, the lessons.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: So the problem I'm trying to solve is how do we stop these elite gatekeeper institutions and listen.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: If you can get educated at the Harvard Business School, it should be cherished.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: It's amazing.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: And for the other 9 billion people on the planet, how do we reach them?
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: That's what I'm thinking really hard about.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: How do we democratize access to education and I'm interested in democratizing access to finance.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: I'm interested in democratizing access to education.
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: The thing I am most interested in today is how do we democratize access to blank, to healthy foods, to all of it.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: So, as we close out one of the things, just thinking about someone who's picked up this book and they're eager to get at it and implement the strategies that you've laid out.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: What is the first thing they need to do?
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Well, if you're thinking of buying the book the paper book or the audio book maybe buy the audio book, ann and I narrate it and maybe listen to it while you're out on walks, because we digest differently when we're in motion.
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: So what I would say is, while you're out walking around, or if you're enterprising and run but I would say walking and you're listening to it and it's making sense I just want you to think about experimenting with it on the hardest problem you have some organizational right to solve.
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: Don't start with the easy stuff.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: Start with the hardest problem that you have some way in on and marvel at what happens.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: OK, all right.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being on the Bold Lounge.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: All the information about the book and your work, as well as Ann's, is in the episode notes.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, frances, for being on the Bold Lounge.
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: Oh, this was so wonderful, and I wish you continued success.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: Through the continuum of bold stories vulnerability to taking a leap you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: Thank you.