You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. I got to say, staying update on what's going on in the world, it can be pretty difficult right now, and the narrative can change pretty quickly. I mean, it's an environment where a soft landing has quickly dissolved into well maybe not or maybe even a US recession or as we just heard with David Weston, who talked with former US Treasury and Wall
Street Week contributor Larry Summers. He talked about the energizer bunny for the US economy. It's how he described it, especially after that strong non forim payrolls print bottom line. A lot coming at US companies, global companies and their leaders. We have a great guest to kind of give us some perspective and what can help leaders in this type
of environment. We talked with her about three years ago about her then latest book Oncommon Service, joining us once again as Francis Fry, Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. Her new book out, Move Fast and Fix Things. The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solve the Hard Problems. She co authored with Anne Morris. The two also co host the ted podcast Fixable. She's joining us
on Zoom from Boston, Massachusetts. Francis so nice to have you back here on Bloomberg, and we do like to remind our viewers and listeners. You also worked at Uber back in twenty seventeen, your senior VP for Leadership and Strategy, and worked on improving the company's culture by really working with them when it comes to teamwork. I want to start big broad if I may, and that is the world, because I feel like the world is this great global
classroom right now. What fascinates you in terms of whether it's Washington, whether it's corporate America, global companies when it comes to thinking about how things are getting done or not getting done.
Oh thanks, Carolyn, Jess, I really appreciate being here. So what fascinates me is that how much we're in our own way. And I actually find that incredibly optimistic because we can get out of our own way. So it's not that externalities are forcing us to behave one way, but that we're either recklessly moving too fast or out of fear we're staying still for too long, and so our finding the balance of how to move fast and fix things. To me, is a really optimistic view of the world. Why do you.
Think the trade off between speed and excellence is false?
Well, I think that when when Mark Zuckerberg said move fast and break things, he convinced people, perhaps unknowingly, that you could either move fast and break things or you could go slow and take care of things. So he presented that you can either take care of people or go fast. But we have found that you can actually go even faster in accelerating excellence if you build trust along the way.
So when you say trust, is it all kinds of trust with your employees, your workforce, with your customers, your suppliers. It's interesting. I talked with the founder and see of Chabani, and you know how he thinks of sustainable business. I know, I know, I'm with you. When he thinks about sustainable business, it's for his employees, it's for his customer, a surrounding community. So come on in on this. When you think about when you talk about trust, what it means.
Yeah, and I do think that it's important to think about it for all of those stakeholders. And so what we find is that whatever problem you're facing, and we encourage people to go after their hardest problem. So whatever the hardest thing you have to do right now, you're going to find that trust is broken down with at least one of those stakeholders. And if you build that trust first and then you go fast on top of it,
h you can accelerate excellence. The mistake we find people make is that they go fast before building the trust, and then very bad things can happen.
Walk us through some of the five essential steps that you talk about as far as moving fast and fixing things.
Sure, and we organize it by day of the week with only a half joke that you can solve any hard problem in a week. But Monday is to solve the real problem, which is most problems present as one thing, but then the root cause is somewhere else. So make sure that you're going not addressing the symptom, but actually getting all the way down to the cause. Tuesday it's to build a good enough plan by solving for trust
at the at the core of it. Wednesday we call it make new Friends Day, and that is whatever your plan is, you've probably talked to too many people who are just like you. So on Wednesday we encourage you to very deliberately make new friends. And the new friends of the type that think differently, see differently, have a different set of skills. So be inclusive of loads of more diverse perspectives. Your plan will become an even better plan. Is it by Thursday?
Oh?
Go ahead?
Oh no, forgive me?
No? Keep?
Yeah, no, no, finish up?
Okay? All right? So Thursday it is a chance to communicate it. And so we have very specific ideas of how to communicate well, which the short version is, understand something so deeply that you can describe it simply, and simply deeply communication is the is the key. And then Friday, go as fast as you can. But please, Friday is day five, It's not days one through four.
You know, why did you write this book now or why did you want to put it out now? Was there something that you saw kind of in real life? You do case studies at Harvard. I'm just curious what it was.
You know, we saw too much what we call responsible stewardship. We saw too many people being paralyzed in the presence of real problems. There was paralysis and when we investigated why are people not moving, it was because they were afraid of the reckless disruption of the moving fast and breaking things. So we did this to provide the roadmap, and it's a playbook. I mean, it tells you exactly how to do it. The roadmap so to get out of the paralysis to solve our world's most urgent challenges.
Hey, I wonder you know, in a week where we've been obsessed with the fraud trial of Samuel bankmin Freed and FTX, there's somebody who moved fast, right, and certainly something's got broken, very reckless, right. So I mean when you look at that story, that case, that reality, and of course only charges will see where this trial ends up. I don't know, how do you look at it or how is it a teaching moment?
Well, for me, it's that it looked like sam didn't really believe he had to build trust with multiple constituents, right, that he he did what he wanted to do and it didn't matter. It didn't matter to him because he was being lavished so much monetarily. So to me like solving the real problem. Probably the real problem was that he was building something that maybe didn't make sense and
then solving for trust at the core of that. So I don't know if it was fraud or not, but I would It looks to me like he moved very fast in the absence of trust, and that's a very classic problem.
Speaking of trust, Frances, it was so quick for the world media investors, big name investors, smart people to quickly mark him, brand him, you know, the JP Morgan of crypto, and believe that he was the go to voice on everything in any crypto. You know, how do you think about that as well? I mean, you know, for me once, shame on you for me twice, like you know, they're always.
Probably more than twice. Yeah, yeah, what is that about? You know? My positives been on It is that we are all like it taps into our optimism that there is a like, dramatically better way and that it will be individuals that bring us there. The pessimistic side of me thinks that we're just looking to get in before everyone else catches on. So we want early money to be benefited, regardless of how it turns out. But it is we are in quite a cycle of believing things
very early without applying the rigor that we show. We are a very rigorous people, but we are willing to suspend that in an increasing frequency.
We have about a minute left in this segment. But what are some examples of leaders who use speed to their advantage to solve their problems? Oh?
Well, I would say Microsoft is my favorite current example. And this is an organization that is so big it should be able to move fast and yeah, and yet look how it has catapulted everyone in the field of AI. And that's just its latest marvel that it's been able to do. And they're getting there. They build trust with all of their stakeholder if they communicate beautifully, they make loads of new friends. So I would say that they are a role model of doing it.
Well, we're continuing our conversation with friends. Is Fry, professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, on her book Move Fast and Fix Things, The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems that she co authored with Anne Morris. The two also co host a tied podcast called Fixable. So she's still joining us on zoom from Boston, Massachusetts. You were just speaking with us and talking with us about the five essential steps to moving fast and fixing
things for corporate leaders. I'm curious about how challenging is it for executives to successfully create a culture where everyone can thrive and try to prevent top talent from leaving.
Yeah, so it's within our capacity. I find that we're not all born with knowing how to do it, and so we try to provide secret memos in the book of here's how to do it. But the prescription we would give for how to do it is that you have to create an environment where, regardless of any difference that any of us represents, our job is to make
one another feel safe and welcome. And then, because of our unique skills, and I think this is really important, because of our uniqueness, we should celebrate and champion one another. When we do that, Oh, your top talent will stay.
One of the things that got my attention because I'm always thinking about this is run better meetings. You have a little notation in your book about it, and I feel like the art of running a good meeting. I will tell you here, we've had conference rooms that don't have chairs in them at times because to make it go quickly, or are reducing like not everybody needs to be here, it's only some you know. So what's your thinking on that?
Yeah, meeting?
Yeah, like where we were having tons of zoom meetings.
Yeah. So first I would say that every meeting has to be have an agenda. If it doesn't have an agenda, you should take that as an invitation not to attend. That's the first thing. The second thing is that whatever the objectives are of the meeting, don't put time stamps next to them. Don't say, oh, this and we'll do for the first third, then the next third and the next third, because we will fill the allotted time. So let us be done when we're done, like, let us be achievement oriented.
The third thing is I do think it's useful to not invite as many people, but you don't want people to feel left out. So I encourage people to tape meetings and encourage people to watch it on two x the speed because that's just about the right speed to do it. That automatically saves half of your time in meetings. And indeed, I would encourage you to go for a walk while you're listening to the meeting. It's a very
intimate way to consume it. And then my last tip is if we're not careful, what will happen in a meeting is you'll say something, then I'll say something similar, and someone else says something similar and similar, and then we all just want to like it. We're just done. Instead, after you say something, the facilitator should say the following phrase. Can someone articulate an alternate point of view? I've now
just sent the message, no more redundancy. Now somebody else is going to say something different, and then one more point of difference. So if we diverge early, we'll converge higher and faster. The problem is, most meetings converge early have loads of redundancy, and we don't actually end up accomplishing very much.
I love that idea of diverging.
How has working from home because of the pandemic ended up affecting leader's ability to try to solve some of these problems when you have a little bit of a barrier if not everybody is in the office with you.
Yeah. So I find that having the ability to be remote like we are right now, or to be in person is better than hiving to either only be remote or only be in person. So I think hybrid dominates the other two and that we should figure out when to use each one. But we want to optimize how we use each one. So people tell me that in Zoom meetings they worry that it doesn't have as much caricatures,
have as much character as in person. I'm like, but in Zoom we have chat, we can courage one another, we can share thoughts, we can use those beautiful emojis that float around in between. So there's many more degrees of dimensionality in Zoom that we just don't often take advantage of. So I encourage people to just as much as you think about how to meet in person, think about how to meet remotely, and I think some beautiful things will happen.
You work with a lot of companies, you write case studies. Are there companies you look at and you're like, God, I just would like a week with them?
Oh yes, So Chabani, who you have on the previous one, like longtime fan, longtime fan of them. I'm also I like hypergrowth, and so I think the company's stripe has done remarkable things in a very short period of time and maintained the dignity of its workforce along the way. So I like them as well. And then for outside of the US, there is a company in Peru called
a Noova Schools. It's the best educated education model I have ever seen anywhere in the world, and they designed a system where people in the emerging middle class they educate them in dramatically awesome ways for a very low fee, and it's for profit. So they've learned how to do this in a way that can be scalable to other countries. So that's where I go for inspiration.
Love that, what does inclusiveness mean to you?
Setting the conditions for everyone to thrive despite any differences that they have, and realizing that we really like people who are really like us, and so we should try to learn the behavior of how to set the conditions for people who are not like us to be to also thrive.
Yeah, I love in your book, You're right, make it physically and emotionally safe to be different, and that despite all the conversations and commitments and goals maybe put out by companies, there's one thing to say it, and then there's one thing to really make an environment where if your view and even the viewpoint, like I love what you said about meetings right to present a different viewpoint, I.
Just let's Yeah, if we just emphasize difference, we will achieve so much more than our instinct to emphasize sameness.
Hey, listen in this final thirty second speaking of difference, the division in politics, is there a fix? There?
There is, but it would require we only know how to help people who want to change. And so if the requirement is that they want to improve, if they wanted to improve, I actually think we could fix it in a week. But what they would have to want to improve and they haven't convinced me of that?
Well, great way to end in such a timely conversation. I love it, Francis, you always make it real and relevant. Thank you so much, have a great weekend and look forward to checking with you once again. Francis Fryes. She's professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. Her new book out, as just mentioned, co authored with Anne Maurice, Move Fast and Fixed Things, The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving hard problems. Joining us on zoom from Boston, Massachusetts.
And as we mentioned, they also do a podcast called Fixable. It's a ted podcast and so just interesting right common sense. Love it. This is Bloomberg