Why you should get good at being bad (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Anne Morriss: Hello everyone. Welcome back to a brand new season of Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Anne Morriss. I'm a company builder and leadership coach. 

[00:00:12] Frances Frei: And I'm your co-host, Frances Frei. I'm a Harvard Business School professor, and I'm Anne's wife. 

[00:00:17] Anne Morriss: Happy New Year to all of our Fixers out there.

We missed you desperately and we could not be more excited to be reunited today. We have so many great episodes in the works. We can't wait to share them with you. And in the meantime, please keep sending us questions so we can keep answering them on the show and let us know if you wanna join us to solve some problems together.

[00:00:39] Frances Frei: Really, this is our idea of a good time. 

[00:00:42] Anne Morriss: We're at a point in our lives where we are not fighting it anymore. 

[00:00:45] Frances Frei: No more. 

[00:00:46] Anne Morriss: So, Frances, to kick off this season of possibility and new beginnings, we wanted to explore an idea that you and I are really passionate about, which is that we all must have the courage to be bad at some things.

[00:01:00] Frances Frei: It sounds like it's a path to mediocrity or a path to laziness, but the truth is we need to make sacrifice in one area in order to make progress in another. And so we want to be as intentional about that which we're gonna be great at as that which we're gonna be bad at. 

[00:01:17] Anne Morriss: Yeah. This is insight that got you tenure at the Harvard Business School.

How important. 

[00:01:23] Frances Frei: The insight that got me tenure at the Harvard Business School was to ask you to marry me. Let's be super honest. . 

[00:01:30] Anne Morriss: Oh, that's a whole other episode , my dear. 

[00:01:33] Frances Frei: All right, we'll wait. We'll wait till the "marry up" episode. 

[00:01:38] Anne Morriss: But yeah, what we wanna get into today is how important it is in organizations to be willing to suck at some part of the value proposition.

And the basic idea is that in order to excel where it matters most, as you said, you have to be willing to underperform and according to your research, not just underperform, really phone it in in, in some other areas. And the key is to be very intentional about those other areas as well. 

[00:02:09] Frances Frei: If you, you have five things that you wanna make investments in.

If you invest in all of them equally, that's one strategy. Another strategy is pick some that you wanna overinvest in, but then you have to underinvest in other things. It's almost an emotional obstacle that gets in the way. We have forgetfulness. 

[00:02:28] Anne Morriss: Yeah, no. In our experience, this is not an intellectually difficult idea, but what's hard in execution is to really have the stomach for it.

All right, Frances, let's start this conversation with an example because I, I feel like this is an idea that people really need to touch and feel to internalize. 

[00:02:58] Frances Frei: So the example that brings it to life most deeply for me is the example of the MacBook Air. I still remember when, about 20 years ago, Steve Jobs strode across the stage carrying a manila envelope.

 And every geek-- 

[00:03:13] Anne Morriss: It wasn't just the geeks. We were all paying attention with this moment. 

[00:03:16] Frances Frei: Yeah, yeah. We were all paying attention. And he was carrying a manila envelope and nobody had any idea what he had in that manila envelope. None of us dared to think that he was going to slide out a computer from that manila envelope.

It was just unprecedented at that time. And he presented to us the MacBook Air. As thin as an envelope. Now to do that, to be best in class at weight, which is what his ambition was, he had to be worst in class at physical features. So to be the lightest weight laptop on the market, he couldn't have an internal CD ROM drive. 

[00:03:55] Anne Morriss: Kids, ask your parents what that was. But am I hearing this right, Frances? So Jobs and his team of incredible designers, they imagined this machine that had never existed before, right? That was the lightest laptop ever, with this beautiful design. And in order to deliver on this thing that they wanted most, right?

This radically lightweight, beautiful design. They had to give up some other things. Now, the example of the CD ROM is literally something they gave up, right? There was no CD ROM, but the other provocative part was that there were other things that they had to include. They had no choice but to include them like a battery, right?

That was good enough, but it wasn't great. 

[00:04:48] Frances Frei: Yes, and I think that the, you just detailed two of the most important parts of strategy, which is what am I not gonna do? And what am I not going to do well? 

[00:04:59] Anne Morriss: I love that because we, you know, what am I not gonna do? That is like a famous definition of strategy, but what we hear a lot less about is, what am I gonna do but not do very well?

And I think that is the emotionally hard part of what you're describing. 

[00:05:17] Frances Frei: It's more difficult, quite honestly. It's much more difficult to do something poorly than to not do it at all. 

[00:05:22] Anne Morriss: The other example that brings this to life for me is the impossible triangle. Um, so tell us about the impossible triangle.

[00:05:31] Frances Frei: Yeah, so in, in, in construction is where it's usually used, which is there is very famously: cost, quality, speed. Pick two . 

[00:05:41] Anne Morriss: Right. I remember this from when we renovated our kitchen.

[00:05:44] Frances Frei: Indeed. Yeah. And, and what it essentially means is that you can't beat the competition at all three of these . And so if you're gonna pick two, you have to, one of them has to give.

It's bad in the service of good, it's sacrifice to make progress. So if you want to speed up the project at the same quality, it's gonna cost more. 

[00:06:06] Anne Morriss: And that's intuitive. 'Cause I gotta hire more people and get them to work after hours and that shit is not free. 

[00:06:11] Frances Frei: So in the world of physical products, this in order to be great, you have to be bad, is not a very emotional conversation.

[00:06:19] Anne Morriss: Right. 

[00:06:20] Frances Frei: And it's because physics applies. Like if I make something that I can drop on my foot, I can't pretend that there aren't trade offs. I can't pretend that I can be best in class at weight and best in class at physical features. Right? That they literally physically trade off against each other. In the world of services, the same physics applies, but we seduce ourselves into thinking that we can be great at everything. So this is more difficult to do in service business. So we often say as shorthand, people think they can defy gravity. It means they're talking about a service and they're acting as if trade-offs don't apply to them.

 And they do. 

[00:07:04] Anne Morriss: Right. And it's our shorthand for saying, you think, delusionally, that you can be great at everything. 

[00:07:11] Frances Frei: Yes. 

[00:07:12] Anne Morriss: And we know from the science that that is physically impossible. 

[00:07:18] Frances Frei: Yes. 

[00:07:19] Anne Morriss: So the moment of truth that I think about a lot is Herb Kelleher, uh, the iconic founder of Southwest Airlines, and he had built this company that was deeply aware of the strategic trade-offs embedded in its model.

You know, in the beginning you didn't get an assigned seat and you didn't get a full meal. But in return, you got cheaper prices and you got more frequent flights, and there's a whole bunch of operational reasons why those two things trade off. So at one point, Herb gets this letter from a very frustrated grandmother.

 And she is like a very sympathetic customer, and she's describing how she travels to see her grandkids frequently, and this is a huge part of her life. She has to transfer airlines, and Southwest has a policy where they won't transfer bags. And this was a very big decision because-- 

[00:08:19] Frances Frei: This is a moment of truth. This is a poignant moment of truth. 

[00:08:22] Anne Morriss: Totally. Because they're in this cutthroat game with all these other airlines, and all the other airlines are providing the service. All these, all, all the other airlines are gonna transfer your bag. So he gets this letter and he responds very thoughtfully. It's basically like we've built an airline that is profitable and doesn't make you sad, right? We're the only ones , right? But in return, we're gonna ask you to make some of these sacrifices, and this is why if we transferred your bag, the whole model would start to fall apart. You know, they have this strategic discipline that is like unprecedented in this industry and in many industries.

But the other thing I love about this story is he basically ccs the entire company. 

[00:09:09] Frances Frei: That's the breathtaking part of it. 

[00:09:11] Anne Morriss: And it's like, this is what it looks like to absorb the emotional tax of these kinds of trade-offs, which is really the hard part in our experience. 

[00:09:23] Frances Frei: And which means it's the part that the leaders should model.

But what we find-- 

[00:09:29] Anne Morriss: Must model! I just wanna underscore that, like just dial it up. You have to, because if you start to like waver even a little bit... 

[00:09:37] Frances Frei: It gets amplified through the rest of the organization. 

[00:09:40] Anne Morriss: We're gonna smell it. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna think, oh, oh, oh, then this, they're not serious about this, so I'm not gonna work as hard as I'm working right now 'cause this shit is hard.

[00:09:49] Frances Frei: And what we find that most people, the further they are away from the front line where the trade off is occurring, .The more likely they are to forget about why the trade-offs need to exist. And so if you find your way to call the CEO, like the CEO, is a guaranteed yes if you can finally get through the gatekeepers to get there.

And that's really bad posturing. The CEO should say the same no as we want the frontline to say it, which isn't a mean no. It's a contextual no. 

[00:10:19] Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm . It's a strategic no. 

[00:10:21] Frances Frei: It's a strategic no. And the reason that he CC'd the rest of the company is it was an educational moment. The reason he doesn't do it is we would have to slow down the turnaround time of airplanes, and if we slow down the turnaround times of airplanes, they calculated it, even 30 minutes slower would correspond to the entire annual profit of the airline. And I think Southwest

had a 30 minute advantage, they could turn their planes around 30 minutes faster because of many of these choices. That gave them essentially the entire profit of the airline. And so anything that got in that way, they can't do. But they didn't do it because they didn't care. And you got the sense that other airlines, when they say no, it's just the person you were unfortunately

assigned didn't care. And if I was, if I was given a more empathetic person, I would've gotten a yes. This was an empathetic no. And that is the key on Dare to be Bad. 

[00:11:18] Anne Morriss: Okay. So say, I'm convinced, I'm ready to get in touch with my inner Herb , and I wanna do this for my own organization. Where do I, where do I start in bringing this kind of thinking, uh, into the system?

[00:11:33] Frances Frei: I think you start with your customers. So you have some, you have an idea of what your service is, what your product is, and who you're serving. So when you have those, you start with a customer. And what is it that the customer values most? And so I often think about this when the customer is thinking of giving you a dollar,

who else are they thinking of giving that dollar to? That's your competitive set. 

[00:11:56] Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm . 

[00:11:57] Frances Frei: And so when the customer is thinking of giving me a dollar, why? What's the most important thing to them? Write it down. What's the next most important thing to them? Write it down. And so on. It's really important that we know the ordering of attributes. Otherwise, we could make the wrong decision. If we're gonna be great at some things and bad at others, goodness, we better be great at the things they value most. 

[00:12:24] Anne Morriss: When you think about your most important customers, the markets that you really want to win in, what do people care about and what is the order in which they care about those things?

[00:12:35] Frances Frei: And the reason that we have people simulate the customer before going and talking to them is twofold. One, it gets you fluent in the language. You're like, it's the pre-conversation so that you're ready to go and be able to participate in the conversation. And you have a hypothesis of what you might hear.

But here's the second reason. I want people to realize how little they can trust their instincts. Because when you simulate it?

[00:12:58] Anne Morriss: It's super humbling. 

[00:12:59] Frances Frei: Oh my god, it's so humbling. 'Cause people have so much confidence. Oh, our customers care about this, this and this. I want them to do this as a group exercise.

'Cause they're gonna be in a group with people who are just as confident and think very differently. Well, first of all, you're both not right. So imagine, and this is what's going on, but imagine if you had two people in the organization pulling the company in different directions. That's what's going on. And so by doing this first, by simulating it first you get to surface, oh my gosh, we're not all going in the same direction. We need to go in the same direction. And then let's go get guided by the people who know the answer, which is the customer. 

[00:13:35] Anne Morriss: It's a really powerful conversation for surfacing these implicit assumptions.

Not only what do customers want, but which customers are most important to us at this time? Like a lot of stuff, really important stuff comes to the surface. Okay, so let's say I get to a confident list. You know, I, I like, I, we work through all of these things. We bring in some external data. We're confident in the list.

What's my next move? 

[00:13:59] Frances Frei: So, if you're going to be successful in that market, look at things at the top of the list. If it's not one, I sure hope it's two. And if it's not one or two, I sure hope it's three. Otherwise, don't be in that business. 

[00:14:10] Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

[00:14:10] Frances Frei: But look at things at the top of the list. And what do you have the operational capability to be great at?

Not what are you great at today? What do you have the potential to be great at if you gave that more attention? And then if I gave that more attention, I have to acknowledge where am I taking attention away? And please don't take attention away from something that's also at the top of the list, right?

Take attention away from something that's at the bottom of the list. 

[00:14:40] Anne Morriss: Exactly. The order you're suggesting here is start at the top. Where do I wanna win? And then reverse engineer. What do I have to give up in order to get there? 

[00:14:50] Frances Frei: And all of it is guided by the customer's preferences.

[00:15:07] Anne Morriss: So, where do my competitors come into this story? 

[00:15:09] Frances Frei: So the competitors come in when we say, what are you gonna be great at? Great is a relative term. What am I going to be better than the competition at? Well, the only way I know that is if I know who the competition is. And most of us, if we go and ask people who the competitors are,

sometimes companies think their competitors are different than who the customer thinks their competitors are. And you know who's right? The customer. 

[00:15:33] Anne Morriss: Right, right. So when, where do companies tend to get stuck in kind of bringing this more strategic use of resources to life inside the system? 

[00:15:45] Frances Frei: Well, one is being disciplined enough to really get to the nitty gritty of that ordering of attributes.

 Most important to least important. That's the first thing. The second thing is we tend to be a generous grader to ourselves and a really harsh grader to the competition. So we overestimate what we look like in the eyes of the customers and we underestimate what our competition looks like in the eyes of the customers.

[00:16:13] Anne Morriss: Oh, it's so good. I mean, we do it just to get through the day. I mean, and you're gonna take that away from me too in this conversation? 

[00:16:19] Frances Frei: So particularly in highly competitive industries where it's the Coke versus Pepsi. Coke is great. Pepsi is bad, or Pepsi is great. Coke is bad. Oh my gosh. Don't listen to anybody on the inside about how well you think it's going.

 You gotta go get market research because we think we are great at everything and we think they're bad at everything. 

[00:16:39] Anne Morriss: All right, so let me ask you a question that we get all the time. How does this approach apply to individuals? Or does it? 

[00:16:48] Frances Frei: Yeah. So this, I think is the most common question that we get when we do this exercise with organizations, which at some point when people find, like they struggle to get it, they wanna be great, they don't wanna be bad.

And then at some point there's the breakthrough of, oh my gosh, in order to be great, we have to be bad. And then the light bulb goes off and they're like, wait a minute. Does this apply to me too? 

[00:17:16] Anne Morriss: We had that same arc when, when we started doing this work and writing about it. We were like, oh shit, this might explain everything.

[00:17:24] Frances Frei: And it turned out it explained everything. Because even though we teach companies around the world, we were getting it wrong at home. 

[00:17:32] Anne Morriss: Yeah, the, the home front is a great one. So you, you often talk about working moms, uh, as, as an example, and this just, this just I just feel this one . But give, you're a better messenger for this.

It's too close to home for me. 

[00:17:47] Frances Frei: Yeah. So when we, when we started studying working moms and we could line up the performance of working moms that were killing it. The working moms that were just one missed handoff away from a catastrophe. I

[00:18:01] Anne Morriss: mean, you know, like just the, like you can, you can like see, you can see this whole spectrum in like the drop off line at preschool.

[00:18:07] Frances Frei: You can see it in the drop off line. You can see it so clearly. I mean, I used to joke that the tell is, are your roots done? . And that's a working mom who's killing it. 

[00:18:15] Anne Morriss: Yeah. There's not the exasperated... yeah. 

[00:18:19] Frances Frei: And so what we found is that the working moms that were killing it were actually internalizing this lesson. And they were choosing to be best in class at a few as a few aspects at work and a few aspects at home.

And they were no longer even trying to be great at being a sibling, a daughter, a sister, a friend. The PTA is a laughable acronym to these working moms. 

[00:18:46] Anne Morriss: Yeah. No one, no one at the PTA meeting has their roots done. Yeah. 

[00:18:51] Frances Frei: Oh, nobody does. And everyone on the on the just one missed handoff away. I love their values.

 They thought, you know what? I'm going to use my own physical exhaustion as the only binding constraint, and at least I'm gonna try to be as good as I used to be before kids, right? At daughter, sister, sibling, PTA and all of that. And so what we're saying is you can either have the nobility of effort and that's that exhausted set of moms, that's exhausted

mediocrity, the nobility of effort. Or you can have the nobility of excellence, and that is being willing to make trade-offs and you can't have both. 

[00:19:36] Anne Morriss: Oh, I felt that. We wrote a book about this. If people are interested in this idea. We wrote a book called Uncommon Service. I'm sure it's in the discount bin now.

It's been a good decade. Um, but we really get into the step-by-step on, on how you do this. Uh, when, when we were writing that book, we were like, okay, well we gotta take this for a test drive. So we went to our young sons and we came up with an ordering of attributes. And one of the things we learned is that they did not value the time we spent volunteering at their school. 

[00:20:12] Frances Frei: At all.

[00:20:13] Anne Morriss: They did not value complicated meals, like more, more chicken nuggets, please. Uh, they did want us to be present when we were home. Like when we were with them, they wanted us to be a hundred percent present. They didn't want us to be checking email in the bathroom. . Again, hypothetical, hypothetical example. 

[00:20:36] Frances Frei: Disappearing for, for conspicuously long bathroom breaks, right?

[00:20:40] Anne Morriss: And the, the trade offs, when we really, we did, we put it on a map, we call these attribute maps. We put it on a map, and one thing that really jumped out at us is if we took back time from some of these activities from like meal prep, like obviously we're still putting nutritional meals on the table, but we're, you know, maybe spending less time.

Everybody went on the new New York Times recipe list. Repetition. It's fine. It was fine for this age. If we were taking time like that, we could spend time finishing our work at the office and not bring it home. And so we were, when we were home, be be totally present. 

[00:21:17] Frances Frei: I mean, do you remember in preschool we used to go, we, by we, I mean you more than me.

You used to spend so many evenings at the preschool on PTA responsibilities and on governance. You were on the board of the school. 

[00:21:32] Anne Morriss: Yeah, and listen, these schools are run by volunteers, but often that volunteer burden is not, uh, equitably distributed. And I'm, I made the wrong choice for our family by really leaning into that part of my obligation.

And it came at the expense 'cause it was one of a list of 20 other things I was doing of being really present and connected to our kids when, when we were home. 

[00:21:59] Frances Frei: And the irony is you were doing it for our kids. 

[00:22:03] Anne Morriss: Oh no. That was a story in my head for sure. 

[00:22:05] Frances Frei: Yeah. 

[00:22:05] Anne Morriss: This, this is for you, honey. 

[00:22:07] Frances Frei: You were staying there at the preschool till midnight.

[00:22:10] Anne Morriss: Well, yeah. 

The, uh, , well, yeah, things went, things went a little awry on, on the governance front, . Um, but yes, that is a true statement. There were some midnight, uh, board meetings. I love that we started the season this way, 'cause I also want us to be able to refer back to this conversation. Uh, because what's interesting is we, I, I think we wrote the book 10 years ago. You did the research 20 years ago, and yet this is still a tension we see in organizations everywhere. And so this is one of the things we are, are gonna push on this season is how do you acknowledge that gravity also applies to you as a leader, as an organization, as a parent, as a human being?

[00:22:57] Frances Frei: Yeah. In fact, the first time we wrote about it was in that bargain bin book, Uncommon Service. The second time we wrote about it was in Unleashed, and the third time we wrote about it was in Move Fast and Fix Things. And it's, I think, the only thing we have written about in all three books because society has not yet, we have not yet said it in a way that people have been able to fully digest.

And it's so important in this semester, in this season, we're gonna take a swing at trying to make sure that our Fixers understand that in order to be great, you have to be bad and we have to be equally unapologetic about both. 

[00:23:38] Anne Morriss: And Frances, I have to tell you, we're gonna be writing about it in the fourth book too.

Because it is a secret memo that needs to be out there. 

[00:23:47] Frances Frei: You just dropped the name of the new book, The Secret Memos. 

[00:23:53] Anne Morriss: Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Your participation helps us make great episodes like this. Please keep reaching out to us in all the ways email, call, text us@fixableatted.com or 2 3 4 FIXABLE.

That's 234-349-2253. 

[00:24:11] Frances Frei: We read, listen, experience every one of your messages. . 

[00:24:17] Anne Morriss: Yeah, please keep communicating.

Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

[00:24:29] Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei. 

[00:24:30] Anne Morriss: This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Daniella Ballarezo, and Roxanne Hai Lash. 

[00:24:40] Frances Frei: And our show was mixed by Louis at StoryYard.

[00:24:44] Anne Morriss: Louis!