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: 99: Chris Voss: Former top FBI hostage negotiator and CEO of The Black Swan Group

Chris Voss is one of the preeminent practitioners and professors of negotiation skills in the world. He was formerly the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI as well as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group.  He is the founder of The Black Swan Group, a consulting firm that provides training and advises Fortune 500 companies through complex negotiations.  He has taught business negotiation in MBA programs at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. He also taught business negotiation at Harvard and guest lectured at other leading universities including the MIT Sloan School of Management and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.  His book is titled: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Working the crisis hotline was where Chris first learned the power of empathy. Showing someone that they feel heard is often enough to get them to change their behavior.
  • Empathy is about the transmission of information whereas compassion is about the reaction to that transmission.
  • Any time you relax into stress, you’ll handle it far better. The act of relaxation increases your body’s ability to handle its stress demands.
  • Labeling is a verbal observation of an emotion or a dynamic. It’s a way of demonstrating that you’re listening and understanding the other side.
  • Meeting someone halfway (i.e. splitting the difference) rarely works since it never feels like it’s really halfway. You feel the transaction was unfair.  Reason being, based on the economist Daniel Kahneman, people tend to fear a loss twice as much as they are likely to welcome an equivalent gain.
  • “Excellence is a delight with learning and growing. It is not the pursuit of perfection which is a fool’s errand.”

 

Notes:

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your Life Depended on It

Black Swan Group

Fireside Black Swan Group Coaching Program

Ep: 88: Marshall Goldsmith: The Father of Executive Coaching

Marshall Goldsmith has been recognized as the world’s leading executive coach and has advised more than 200 major CEOs and their management teams. He is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Mojo, and Triggers. His latest book is titled: The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Basing success strictly on results is a fool’s game. The Buddhist term for this is The Hungry Ghost – always eating but never full.
  • Success should be defined as: Are you doing something that is connected to your higher aspirations, are you doing that’s meaningful, and do you enjoy the process.
  • He pioneered the 360 feedback process which includes taking personal references away from the office to truly understand someone’s character.
  • What separate the great from the exceptional leaders are courage, humility, and discipline.
  • “We are living an earned life when the choices, risks, and effort we make in each moment align with an overarching purpose in our lives, regardless of the eventual outcome.”
  • To have a good life, we need to align our aspirations, our ambitions and our actions. Most executives you coach get stuck on the ambition phase.
  • “Excellence is focusing on achievement that’s consistent with something that’s meaningful to you and something you enjoy.”

 

Notes:

The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment

What Got You Here Won’t Get Your There: How successful people become even more successful

Marshall Goldsmith website

100 Coaches

Ep 44: Jerry Colonna: VC-turned executive leadership coach

Jerry Colonna is the founder and CEO of Reboot.IO, an executive coaching and leadership development firm whose coaches are committed to the notion that better humans make better leaders. Previously he was a successful venture capitalist with JPMorgan Partners and Flatiron Partners focused on technology startups. His new book is titled Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.  He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Growing up in a chaotic environment with an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother drove his associating money with safety.
  • There was a dissonance between the way he felt internally and the way he was perceived in the world which led to a deep depression.
  • You can’t be a better leader without being a better human and you can’t be a better human without going through radical self-inquiry.
  • Radical self-inquiry is the process by which self-deception becomes so skillfully and compassionately exposed that no mask can hide us anymore.
  • We all have psychological baggage – our inner demons – which hold us back as leaders and we must confront those demons in order to grow.
  • It is a fallacy to think that leadership is all about having all the answers and not having any fear or any doubt. Authentic leadership is about accepting your imperfections.
  • Learn about the important difference between grit and stubbornness.
  • “We have to be willing to accept life as it is, not as we wish it might become. To live in the reality of what is today, not what might be in the future.”

 

Links:

Book: Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up

Reboot Website: www.reboot.io

Jerry Colonna Bio: www.reboot.io/team/jerry-colonna

Ep 35: Beth Comstock: Disrupter, Innovator, Change Agent: The Former Vice Chair at GE

Beth Comstock spent over 25 years at GE where she was a vice chair, CEO of Business Innovations and Chief Marketing Officer among other roles. She has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune and Fast Company and has been named to the Fortune and Forbes lists of the world’s most powerful women.  Her new book is titled Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change.

 

Some interesting insights from this episode:

  • Risk taking is a skill that can be learned.
  • “Most of us fear losing what we have more than we desire winning something we don’t have.”
  • Due to her risk taking mentality, Jeff promoted her to Chief Marketing Officer, a role that hadn’t existed at GE for over two decades.
  • She had to overcome a lack of self-confidence along with her introversion in order to speak up, challenge others and be effective in her role.
  • Success correlates as closely with confidence as it does with competence.
  • Much of the success of Hulu was attributed to hiring an entrepreneur from the outside and keeping him independent vs hiring someone from the inside.
  • She led GE’s disruptive green initiative called Ecomagination which pushed an aggressive clean energy agenda throughout GE’s multiple business lines.
  • GE executives often struggled to see parallels from developments happening in other industries due to a common cognitive bias called Functional Fixedness.
  • She pioneered a new program at GE called Fastworks which leveraged the lean methodology to experiment with new product ideas, increase innovation and accelerate time to market.
  • “Excellence is a never ending journey of learning and trying to get better.”