Ep: 100: Amy Edmondson: Harvard Business School Professor and Leadership Guru on the Art of Failing Well

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety over twenty years. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and more. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Edmondson’s TED Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team” has been viewed over three million times. She received her PhD, AM, and AB from Harvard University. Her latest book is titled: The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • A good failure is an undesired outcome that brings you new knowledge that could have not been gained any other way. It should be just big enough to get new information without wasting unnecessary time.
  • Most of us have shifted from curiosity and learning in our childhood to defensiveness and self-protection in our adulthood because of the belief that we had to be right or successful to be worthy.
  • Psychological safety Is a belief that one can take interpersonal risks without the fear of punishment or rejection.
  • You need psychological safety in order to cultivate a culture of intelligent failure.
  • Reframing is one of the techniques we can use to learn from failure. It’s the ability to challenge the automatic thinking and come up with a healthier, more productive way to think about the same situation.
  • A culture of accountability and high-performance standards can coexist with a culture of psychological safety and embracing failure.
  • “The easiest way to not fail at all is to not take risks at all.”
  • “Excellence is doing as well as you can in your chosen field and making a positive difference.”

 

Notes:

Books:

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

Websites:

Amy Edmondson personal page

Harvard Business School bio

Ep: 95: Carol Tomé: CEO of UPS

Carol Tomé is the Chief Executive Officer of UPS.  Previously she served as Chief Financial Officer for The Home Depot.  Carol serves as board member for Verizon Communications, Inc., board of councilors for the Carter Center and is a board trustee for Grady Memorial Hospital Corporation and the Atlanta Botanical Garden.  Carol has been named twice to the Forbes list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women and was listed second on The Wall Street Journal’s list of best Chief Financial Officers, and among the top 50 most powerful women in business by Fortune magazine.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • She was a competitive downhill ski racer growing up which taught her the importance of advanced preparation. To this day she goes into every meeting well prepared.
  • When she first joined Home Depot, she wasn’t getting through and winning people over so she went to work in the stores to learn the business so she could speak their language.
  • She had a transformative moment at Home Depot when she realized that she was working too hard and didn’t have a purpose and dedicated herself from that day forward to making a difference. This changed how she interacted with the people around her.
  • Much of her success was learning to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, faster than you, and better than you. They lift you up and give you wings.
  • One of her ingredients to success has been to be well networked. Always first look to make deposits with people so down the road you’re in a position to ask for a withdrawal.
  • “Excellence is about thinking all the way around the problem. Go slow to go fast. Or in the language of home improvement, measure twice, cut once.”

Ep 53: Safi Bahcall: Physicist, Biotech Entrepreneur, Organizational Behavioral Guru

Safi Bahcall received his BA in physics from Harvard and his PhD from Stanford. He co-founded Synta Pharmaceuticals—a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer.  He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he served on the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Safi is the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. The book was selected by Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Susan Cain, and Adam Grant for the Next Big Idea Club.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • “Very often people go on a path that the world expects them to without ever pausing to say ‘why am I doing this?’”
  • For an entrepreneur, the critical ingredient for success in building a company is surrounding yourself with talented executives and then bridging the divide between people who wouldn’t naturally interact with one another.
  • Culture are the patterns of behavior you see on the surface in an organization while structure is what’s underneath that’s driving those patterns of behavior. The activities being rewarded (i.e. incentive structures) will drive the culture.  So it’s the structure that’s ultimately most important in influencing behavior.
  • As companies mature, employees tend to shift from focusing on collective goals toward focusing more on careers and promotions. To reduce that behavioral shift, you want to minimize the growth in compensation that comes with each level in the organization.  In addition, you want to maximize span of control.  With fewer promotions and less of a financial incentive as you move up the organization, employees will focus more on their projects and less on corporate politics.
  • You want some employees focused on activities that reduce risk and another set of employees focused on maximizing intelligent risk taking. Effective leaders create a dynamic equilibrium between these two groups and are able to effectively balance the core with the new.
  • Most innovative products will have at least one or two false fails on their way to achieving significant market traction. The key to success is to get really good at investigating failure and not just accepting it on face value.
  • Companies need to create a new C-suite role called a Chief Incentives Officer whose job is to design customized incentive packages to motivate employees and optimize outcomes.
  • “Excellence is always striving to improve yourself and improve your performance.”