The Parlor Room

In our second special episode featuring Season 1 bonus content, host Chris Linnane shares exclusive, unaired clips from his conversations with Harvard Business School faculty members.

Tune in for insights from Linda Hill on leadership's imperatives and developing contextual intelligence, Mihir Desai on making finance more accessible, Forest Reinhardt on learning through the case method, and Joshua Margolis on using real-world examples to teach business concepts.

Catch up on Season 1 of The Parlor Room:

Season 1 Bonus Content (Mike Wheeler, Jill Avery, Jeff Bussgang, and Nien-hê Hsieh): https://hbs.me/yz22txwr

Linda Hill on Leading Change and the Paradoxes of Management: https://hbs.me/3hbsm25b

Mihir Desai on Apple's Powerful Financial Model: https://hbs.me/yd84j56n

Forest Reinhardt on Climate Change and the Tragedy of the Commons: https://hbs.me/2p85nasj

Joshua Margolis on Elevating Your Leadership Style: https://hbs.me/59st27cn

Transcript

Chris Linnane:

The Parlor Room is an official podcast of Harvard Business School Online.

Welcome to The Parlor Room where business concepts come to life. My name is Chris Linnane, and I'm the creative director of Harvard Business School Online. So this is part two of our season one extras. I always need to leave some great stuff on the cutting room floor, and that feels like a massive waste. It's like walking away from a pinball machine with one ball left to play. I need a much cooler reference than that. It's like being a major Fast and the Furious fan, and they stopped at making only 10 movies. We never would've gotten that amazing eleventh movie. That's sarcasm. It's a missed opportunity. What I'm trying to say here is if I don't put this out, it's a missed opportunity. I have four previously unheard segments for you. We cover quite a range. I know you'll walk away from this episode with some powerful takeaways. So thank you very much for tuning in. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Let's get started.

We will kick things off with Professor Linda Hill. Professor Hill is building our Leading in a Digital World course, which is part of our CLIMB program. Linda was an awesome guest on the show. We start with Linda breaking down a concept from her book, Being the Boss. It's called the three imperatives of leadership. This is a powerful framework. I instantly thought of many places in my career where this framework would supply a valuable perspective.

Linda Hill:

So in Being the Boss, we talk about the three imperatives of leadership. The first imperative of leadership is managing yourself; using yourself as an instrument to get things done. You're trying to match your intent to your impact. The second imperative of leadership is managing your network. That is about managing all the relationships with people over whom you have no formal authority, but you're deeply dependent on to get your job done. People inside the organization, people outside the organization. The third imperative is managing your team. That is managing relationships with those people who do in fact report to you. So what we see is that managers often focus downward. They think about the group who reports to them. That's who I'm responsible for. Yeah, you got to get that group right, because if you don't get that group right, you can't leverage yourself to manage the other two imperatives.

Managing the network or managing yourself, which is another piece of it. But the managing your network is what we're getting at with this particular paradox. If you don't manage your network, if you don't build the right relationships with your bosses and your peers, you will be powerless. And if you've ever worked for a powerless boss, it's a horrible thing because the team all knows we should be doing this, we should be doing that, but we can't get access to the resources. We need to do it because you, boss, are powerless, because you don't know how to influence the peers and the bosses to get what we need. So in fact, if you ignore that network piece, the context within which your team resides, you will be powerless. They won't necessarily be working on the right things. You won't be in the right conversations to know what are the priorities, constraints, and capabilities of our organization and how does our team's work fit into that? You're not talking to the right people. You're not influencing the right people, and again, you won't have the resources.

Chris Linnane:

A little later in our interview, Professor Hill dove deeper and described what she calls contextual intelligence. This is something I'm sure everyone can learn from.

Linda Hill:

So one of the things that we really try to help people do, when they're here anyway, and in our course is think about contextual intelligence. What's really important in the context? Be more of a systems thinker. What's the broader point of view? Instead of saying, "Oh, Chris is behaving that way because he's a jerk," or "He's always trying to win," or whatever it is. Well, what's the context? What's connecting us? What's the system we're a part of? And let me look at those connections and understand all of that as well as what's going on between the two of us. Because often we take something that's a systemic dilemma and turn it into an interpersonal one. And to solve it, you've got to go back and look at the system itself, not just at your interpersonal relationship. So that's about that contextual intelligence, because one of the things we've learned from a number of our colleagues here at Harvard Business School, whether they're in strategy or leadership, is that you do your planning.

You try to predict what you think you're going to find when you go into a new market or work with a new person. But these are all assumptions. And until you get into that environment, which is one of the things we'll be talking about in our course, until you actually start working in that environment, you can't really learn what you need to learn about what it takes to be successful there. So one of the keys is for you as a leader to have a learning mindset and to make sure your team members have that learning mindset and understand that as one leader said to us once, "Almost everything we do is kind of a working hypothesis." It's a hypothesis. And then we start to act. And once we start to act, because you never have complete information, and particularly in the kind of world we live in now, it's ambiguous. Whatever we have to act, whether or not we're going to be effective is based on how quickly we can learn what our impact is of our decisions. Because once we see the impact, either we're going in the right direction or you know what we're not, and we got to pivot. So this learning orientation and understanding that you don't know as much as you think is in this kind of world we live in today, that is key.

Chris Linnane:

OK, now we're going to change gears a little. Our next segment comes from Professor Mihir Desai. Professor Desai's HBS Online course is called Leading with Finance. He has an incredible knack for taking the complex and making it accessible for anyone. During our interview, we discussed the lack of financial education in most people's early lives. He had a wonderful personal story that you may learn from and borrow for your own family.

Mihir Desai:

I was actually talking to my daughters this morning about something that I did with them and that my parents did with me, which is I created something for them, which was called the Bank of Papa, which was I gave them a little book, like a little kind of moleskin book, and they got a virtual allowance. This was all funny money, and they would write it down and it would be a weekly allowance, like $2. But the key was that they could spend it or they could save it. And at the Bank of Papa, they got an astronomic interest rate incentives. That's great. It was like 20% per week, which is a crazy interest rate. But if at the time, interest rates were zero, so if you went to a normal bank, it was totally uninteresting for them to learn about savings. So I gave them some juiced-up interest rate, and then they had to by hand calculate what the interest receipts were for that week, and then they would compound, so they would see that compounding happening.

That I think taught them a ton about savings. It taught them a ton about compounding, which is a big idea in finance, actually. Oddly, I think it taught them some math because they literally had to handwrite all this stuff. But that sounds like a very simple story, but I think it's a way to expose children to these ideas at very, very young ages. So they get imprinted with it as opposed to getting exposed to 20 or 25 or 40. I think our course that we built together does that for people who are older, much more in a advanced way, but the real solution lies at the K-12 level. So people spend their life stiff arming finance, I don't want to deal with it. You'll find very senior executives who have stiff-armed finance and been very successful, but then at some point in their career, if they don't engage with finance, it's very hard.

It's very hard to succeed because finance is omnipresent. So my basic instinct about all this work is that we have to make finance more accessible and less intimidating and make it clear to people that they have the ability and then to spark that curiosity that makes them want to learn about it. I think the key thing that one can do if you're 10 years old or 40 years old, or 70 years old, it's actually interesting. You find so many people who are retired who get engaged in finance and they start to love it. And so it's a lifelong journey, and it's never too late to start to get into the ideas of finance, and that's kind of what the course is about, and that's what all of this is about.

Chris Linnane:

The Bank of Papa sounds like a pretty great bank. I once went into a bank in Harvard Square to change an American dollar into four quarters for a parking meter, and the teller super dramatically rolled his eyes and said, "Buddy, we don't just give away money." That wouldn't happen at the Bank of Papa. In fact, if he had an account at the Bank of Papa when he was a kid, I wouldn't have gotten a parking ticket from the Cambridge Police.

Anyway, our next segment comes to us courtesy of Professor Forest Reinhardt. Professor Reinhardt has two courses with HBS online. The first is Global Business, and his latest course Business and Climate Change, which he created with HBS Professor Mike Toffel.

What I really appreciate about Professor Reinhardt's approach is how he never loses sight of the learner. In both of his courses, he covers some extremely heavy subjects, but he does an outstanding job of bringing it all back down to Earth. In this clip, his focus, as usual, is the learner. We go behind the curtain and we dive deep into HBS's case method.

Forest Reinhardt:

Well, the whole idea of the case method is for us to put ourselves in the shoes of a person who's confronting a decision so that the stereotype of the paper cases is Mr., Ms. Lots stared out the window of her office over the New York skyline and wondered what to do about X, and it got so bad that the case services people at Harvard Business School forbade us from using that opening line unless we could actually document that the person actually had stared out of a window and that it did actually overlook the skyline that we said it overlooked. But the idea was if you can put yourself in the shoes of that person and try to understand how the world appears to him or to her, then it gives you insight not just into his or her behavior, but into the way the world works that would otherwise escape you.

I mean, it's a little bit like the force inculcation of empathy, right? Because you're trying to figure out how the world looks to someone who is not you. And that itself is a huge leap, and it's one that I think accounts for the success of a lot of our alumni. That just the constant practice of seeing the world from a different point of view than your own, and understanding that if someone else sees the world differently from you, it doesn't mean that he or she is somehow intellectually flawed or morally or something else. It means that there are legitimate differences in the ways that we perceive things. And some people when they encounter that, say, "I think about things this way, and you think about things that way, that means we have to fight." But more often in the actual world, if I see things one way and you see things in another way, that's an opportunity for us to do business together, right? If I am holding something and I don't think it's very valuable and you think it's valuable, that's not a reason to fight. That's a reason to trade, and that's the engine that has driven world prosperity ever since the beginning.

Chris Linnane:

Our final segment is from Professor Joshua Margolis, along with his colleague Tony Mayo. Joshua has two leadership courses with HBS Online: Leadership Principles and Organizational Leadership.

I always have a fun time talking to Joshua, and I'm never entirely sure where he is going next. This next clip is a perfect example. Out of nowhere, he asked me to play the role of his therapist. He threw me way off balance on purpose, and I wasn't sure where to go with it, but as you'll hear, he had his reasons. It was a fun exercise and an even deeper look into the HBS case method and the role of real-world experts in our learning model.

Joshua Margolis:

So Chris, I've got a question for you. I'm going to ask you to be a clinical psychologist for a minute. Connect these dots. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. I love popcorn. You open a bag of popcorn and you put it in front of me. I'm going to eat the whole thing. I love the music of Nanci Griffith and Kasey Chambers, both of them, their music and their lyrics. Take me to places that, it's just amazing music. And I would also add the band Dawes. Just, I listen to the lyrics, I hear the music just takes me to places. I'm a lifelong fan of the Muppets. I just adore the Muppets, the humor that the Muppets have, the manic nature of it, how they bring everybody with, I just love the Muppets. It just brings a smile to my face. And then I love the fiction of Jane Smiley. I think the fiction that Jane Smiley writes captures humanity, captures life in a way that even the best social science can't touch. Alright? So I've just given you this set of data points and you have an opportunity to profile me, a

Chris Linnane:

Profile of you just about your personality, who you are.

Joshua Margolis:

Based on those data points.

Chris Linnane:

I think it tells me that you're a dreamer, you're creative, and you like to experience life. I think you're in good shape, Joshua. You don't need to see me anymore.

Joshua Margolis:

Awesome. I can take that 250 bucks a week and I can go to Vegas.

Chris Linnane:

Yes.

Joshua Margolis:

Awesome.

Chris Linnane:

It hurts me to let go of another client, but I'm thinking about getting out of the business anyway. For a second there I was like, "I think I'm supposed to hit a target."

Joshua Margolis:

Chris, it's really interesting how you reacted to that question because you said, I worried that I was supposed to hit a target. Welcome to the Harvard Business School approach to pedagogy, which is oftentimes people come into our courses and they think, "I've got to guess what the professor is hiding in their back pocket. There must be an answer; one answer." And the case method, participant-centered learning, which people experience in the Harvard Business School Online courses, it's not about one right answer. It's about figuring it out for yourself. Because what we're trying to do is equip people to be able to handle challenges the likes of which they haven't encountered before. So whether it's Mia Mends or Erasmo Nuzzi or Chip Bergh or Rakefet Russak Aminoach, some of the protagonists in our two courses, we're not training you to be them. We're not training you to step into General Mills or Medtronic. We're not training you to do exactly what they did. We want you to engage deeply interactively with our protagonists, with the questions in these two courses so that in your career, whatever hits you, whatever new challenge or opportunity comes your way, you are equipped to take it on. There isn't a right answer. Whoa, how do I make sense of this? How do I understand it? And then how does that set me up to build a relationship or to take action in the world?

Chris Linnane:

So that wraps up part two of our bonus content from season one. If you haven't heard part one or any of the other episodes from season one, please go back and have a listen. You can also watch on YouTube.

Learn more about the show on theparlorroompodcast.com. And don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X.

My name is Chris Linnane. Thank you so, so much for listening. If you're enjoying The Parlor Room, please share the show with your friends and subscribe, rate, and review it wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.