In this second special episode of season two bonus content, host Chris Linnane shares exclusive, never-before-heard clips from his conversations with Harvard Business School faculty members.
Tune in to hear Amy Edmondson, Anthony Mayo, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and Nancy Koehn discuss leadership, strategy, and resilience.
Catch up on Season 2 of The Parlor Room:
Watch The Parlor Room on YouTube: https://hbs.me/2p8nm35m
Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio fileThe following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio file
Chris Linnane:
The Parlor Room is an official podcast of Harvard Business School Online.
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Chris Linnane:
Welcome to this special bonus episode of The Parlor Room. So we received some amazing listener questions. And while we try to answer as many as we can, some don't make it into our regular episodes. But that's why I love these bonus episodes. In this one, we'll hear from four experts on leadership, strategy and resilience. And to lead off, we have Professor Tony Mayo, who teaches leadership principles and organizational leadership at HBS Online. He led off the last bonus episode, as well, so that kind of makes him the Rickey Henderson of The Parlor Room. Actually, maybe not.
Rickey Henderson was the best leadoff hitter in the history of baseball, but he also had a huge ego, which was funny. But Professor Mayo has no ego and is one of the kindest professors I've ever met. But Rickey Henderson was the best leadoff, and Professor Mayo is the best leadoff. So it works. In this clip, he addresses the delicate balance between seeking advice and making decisions as a leader.
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Chris Linnane:
How do successful leaders balance exercising independent judgment with engaging the wisdom of their teams?
Anthony Mayo:
Yeah, this is a good question, because I think a lot of times when we think about leadership, it's about taking charge and making a decision. And do I do that on my own, or do I crowdsource information? And I think it's really a bit of both. I think the best leaders solicit opinions, solicit perspectives, and then make the judgment call. So ultimately, you have to make the judgment call. But you want to make an informed judgment call by understanding the perspectives of the people on your team.
And you want to be able to articulate to them, particularly if you're not going with their advice, why you're not going with their advice. I often advise leaders, don't ask your team. If you've already made up your mind, then I think it's a different calculus. You need to decide, OK, I've made up my mind, or we're going to do this for these particular reasons. Just tell that. The leaders get in trouble when they, sort of, fake ask for advice, and they already know, or they're trying to get something rubberstamped, or they want somebody to say something to support their particular perspective.
If you really are on the fence and you value the input of the people on your team and your peers, et cetera, then yes, ask for that advice. Ultimately, you will have to make a decision, but you want to go back to the people that you've sought advice from and say, I appreciate the advice you've given me, I've made this decision for these particular reasons, I hope that you will support me, that sort of thing going forward.
Chris Linnane:
What else would you like to leave our listeners with in regards to leadership? What's something they can take away and implement tomorrow in their positions?
Anthony Mayo:
So I think there are two things that I think are important to think about in terms of leadership. One of the things that we know is that, as you advance in your career, there are two things that end up degrading over time. One is self-awareness, and the other is empathy. And so sort of a cautionary tale is, as you rise higher in the organization, as you succeed, you often, or many individuals become less empathetic because they've been successful. They feel like they don't need to seek advice.
But if you're working, as we are increasingly working in diverse teams and across cultures, you can make assumptions that are quite faulty, and you can rely on past experience and past success. And that can be your Achilles heel. And so you want to be cautious about, am I creating the conditions where I'm getting advice, where I'm getting support, where people are giving me feedback, that you're opening yourself up to feedback, you're opening yourself up to criticism.
And that can be hard, the further we move up in the organization and our empathy quotient declines. So I always tell senior executives when I'm working with them, do you have the truth tellers in your organization? Are you seeking advice and input from others? Are you still honing your empathy skills? Because I think about the world in which we live in, which is more polarized than we would like, a lot more conflict, lots of divides. If we're going to build bridges together, we need to be able to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes. We need to see the world from multiple perspectives.
It doesn't mean I have to agree with you, but it means that I understand why you may be thinking the way that you're thinking. And just asking those questions of yourself and of others can enable us to have a richer and more diverse perspective on the world.
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Chris Linnane:
Next, we turn to Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, who teaches business strategy at HBS Online. He challenges us to look beyond buzzwords like disruption, ecosystems, flywheels. I could go on and on and on, and I'm sure you could too, and focus on what truly sets a business apart. Let's hear his take on why clarity in strategy is key.
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Chris Linnane:
I find strategy concepts like disruption and innovation challenging to apply in practice. Is there a real-world example that can help make these ideas more concrete?
Felix Oberholzer-Gee:
So disruption has really become very common, and it's one of these diffuse business terms that, actually, people love to use. But they can mean very different things, and sometimes, I think they mean very little. So disruption is like ecosystem, is like flywheel, is like lazy thinking when you don't want to be specific about what the benefit or what the idea is that you use these very broad terms. So there is a new flavor for yogurt. And we say oh my God, the yogurt market has been disrupted, which of course, is, like, 1,000 miles away from the original idea.
The original disruption idea comes from Clayton Christensen, a colleague of mine. And it was this observation that a particular set of companies, leading companies, over time, they often overshoot what customers really want. They provide a little more because they get better, they get better, they get better. They provide a little more, say, in quality, or safety, or anything. Customers really want those things, but maybe just not quite as much. And that would open up a way to come in and produce a product that was placed in a way that is inferior to the dominant product. Often, has a beneficial quality price trade off.
So a classic example might be the first Toyotas that got sold in the United States. You look at the car and you go, oh my God, who's going to drive this thing, it's a terrible car in many ways. But if you were young, if you didn't have unlimited budget, that was maybe exactly the car you wanted. What Professor Christensen was about was, how is it that small companies ever have a chance against the behemoths of the industry, because the big companies have everything. They have low cost of capital. They have access to technology. They have the best employees. How is it that sometimes small companies can be successful?
And his idea was, if you position your company that way, the big company might see what you do, but they will have very limited incentives to respond, because you serve a low margin segment of the market. You have a lower quality product relative to what they do. So that was the original idea. And I think you still see today, for instance, companies that enter with products that are less than perfect, where the less than perfect provides meaningful differentiation. So that was the original idea.
And then we used it for everything else, and as a result, everyone, including myself, we're a little confused. What are we even talking about when we talk about disruption? So it's not the classic idea that was a specific way to worry about the big companies. So for instance, imagine you have an idea for a product that would compete with Google. What's your biggest concern? That Google will see what you do, and they will either buy you at a really low price, because you know your company has no future, or they will just replicate what you have done, because they know your company has no future.
And as a result, you would then stay away from these kinds of businesses. So there was a very tangible, interesting advice how to position relative to an incumbent, a big company that dominates the market. By making language and terms less precise, we now get to use it for everything, but we also lose a little bit the core. And then to the question, not surprising that it's hard to figure out what the core of the idea actually is.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because I did a few lessons with Clay early on. We talked about low end disruption with the Honda Super Cub versus the Harley Davidson.
Felix Oberholzer-Gee:
Yeah.
Chris Linnane:
The rebar industry, the steel industry. And I thought I got it, and then I started reading all these articles where they're also saying disruption. And I was like, now I'm actually losing what disruption means. And it is interesting that it has a lot of definitions now, a lot of usages now. But is it fair to say that Clay's is the most accurate, business terminology wise?
Felix Oberholzer-Gee:
I wouldn't want to say accurate. It's one idea how disruption in the market can happen. If you then look at companies like Tesla, they disrupted the market for cars, but not in a way that is consistent with the classic definition of disruption. So they come in and they, in many ways, they have higher willingness to pay. Because as you might remember in the beginning, what they really emphasize is, oh, acceleration and the sense of being in a really fast car, and so on and so on.
They didn't really emphasize environmental aspects or these kinds of things all that much. So that's, in some senses, another way to enter the market, because I come in with a value proposition that drives willingness to pay, but in a way that is really differentiated from the way we have always done it. People now call this disruption, as well, but it's just a way to come from the top, where you have higher willingness to pay, relative to the service, relative to the products that are available in the market.
And there are many examples. Uber is like that. Right? It's a better value proposition, in particular at the fairly lower prices that they offer to begin with. So I don't mean to say there's only one way to upset the market, but it just pays to be precise about what is exactly our idea. Now, don't say we have an ambition to disrupt the market, but don't be specific about why it is that customers should buy for you, why it is that employees should work at your business. Same if you're thinking about, oh, let's build an ecosystem.
Well, that can mean a million different things as we talk about in the course. Sometimes it is about compliments and it's really powerful. Sometimes it's just about umbrella branding. Sometimes it's about price discrimination by bundling. So it could mean very different things. And if you're not clear, if you're not precise, I think you typically fail in the end, because it wasn't so obvious what you wanted to do to begin with. This is, I think, one element, as you know from the course, that we really try to be very careful about trying to understand how is it that a particular company wins.
Because that how, if you have an exact definition, or if you deeply understand how the how happens, that actually produces a significant competitive advantage in itself.
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Chris Linnane:
Now let's shift gears to resilience and leadership. Professor Nancy Koehn, who teaches about leadership and the history of leadership at HBS, will take us through some of the key traits that define great leaders. And if you're interested in learning more, you can check out her free lesson on resilient leadership by searching for it on the HBS Online website. Resilient leadership. I'll say it one more time. That's the search term. Resilient leadership.
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Chris Linnane:
Your research spans cultures and time periods. What common threads have you observed in how great leaders emerge and succeed across such diverse contexts?
Felix Oberholzer-Gee:
I think a lot of the critical elements or aspects, I don't want to use the word qualities, which I've used before, but I'm careful about it because that implies that, somehow, your DNA determines whether you're going to be a great leader. And I think leaders are made much more than they're born. And as I said before, I think they come in all shapes and sizes. So the aspects, I think, of being a great leader are largely transcendent with respect to cultures, and countries and time.
And again, those elements are the embrace of a serious mission, a serious, worthy mission and hewing oneself to that mission, finding ultimately some sense of identity or personal fulfillment in that mission. That's really, really important. And you see that across great leaders. And it's really important, not just because it means a leader has a North Star to head towards as they're taking action, or navigating crises, or suffering disappointments. It also really helps, really stokes a leader's self-confidence in those hours, those hours in the middle of the night when a leader wakes up and says, holy moly, I don't know how to do this.
I can't go back to sleep because I have no idea what we're going to do tomorrow to take the next step. Again, hewing to a really important mission will help feed the-- stoke the fires of self faith in moments of self-doubt. So that's a really important aspect, I think, a great mission. A second really important aspect, I think, is the idea that I can get in a game and I can help others get in a worthy game.
So this idea that, regardless of whether you're opening a bakery or founding a school for students that are young people who are emotionally challenged, or setting up, right, some kind of activism about an unjust law, regardless of what you're doing, the idea that you want to help other people do that with you is so important. Because all great leaders pretty quickly learn that the Hollywood idea, or the Superman idea of a single hero is an absolute myth. And so you're going to have to figure out how to lock arms and work with other people to accomplish what you want to accomplish.
So that means you're going to help other people get into your mission game. And that's a really important element. Do you want to do that? Then you're already qualifying yourself for a really interesting leadership journey. If that's not appealing to you, and you like to work alone, and you don't want to deal with other people, and you don't care whether they get in your game, then that takes you off, I think, off the paved stones of the journey of a lot of leaders. Let me mention two other things that we haven't talked about.
A third, if you will, again, aspect or element here, I think, is that great leaders understand that what they're going to try to do is not going to be-- not necessarily going to be perfect the first time out. So you're in a sense-- it's almost like clay. And there are moments, not just in crisis, but even in moments of relative stability when you're like, well, we're going to throw this clay across the room and see what happens when it hits the floor where the floor meets the floorboards, or where the baseboards meet the wall boards and see what happens.
So there's this element of experimentation that we don't usually talk about with leaders' work, but it's so critical. You have to be willing at various moments to say, we're throwing the pasta against the wall and see if it sticks. Because when you're trying to do something that hasn't been done before, you're trying to do something that's hard but worthy, there usually isn't a perfect rule book or a recipe book or manual about how you do it. So this willingness to intelligently create incredible experience is a really important element.
And I'd say the last thing-- again, we haven't talked about this-- is some real creativity. Leadership is not a science. It's as much an art as it is a craft. And so there's elements dealing with people, taking on a crisis, moving something, an endeavor forward when it stuck that involves this willingness to walk around the problem and look at it from different angles, going, can we try that. It's real creativity, and it has an element of the artist-- artist's endeavor in it. And leaders have to be willing to develop that piece, as well, as opposed to, well, here's the manual. Figure A says we use we put this screw in this hole.
A lot of stuff that leaders deal with has nothing to do with manuals, and screws, and holes, and standard operating policies.
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Chris Linnane:
OK, to close this episode, we have a short but powerful clip from Professor Amy Edmondson on how to grow while leading.
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Amy Edmondson:
I'd love to leave our listeners with the following. I have found that once we accept the fact that each and every one of us is a fallible human being, then we can feel OK about our fallibility. After all, we're in good company. And so we can get less sort of upset and emotional about the things that go wrong and do better at just learning from them, at taking those things as data that help us learn and grow.
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Chris Linnane:
If you'd like to dive deeper into these ideas, check out Professor Amy Edmondson's HBS Online course, CLIMB, which stands for credential of leadership impact and management in business. I don't want to brag, but I memorized that. So thank you for listening to this bonus episode. If you're enjoying the show, please share it with your colleagues and your networks. And if you haven't already, check out our video versions of each episode. We have video versions. OK, thank you, and we'll see you next time here in The Parlor Room, or there in The Parlor Room. If you're watching the video, I'm not in The Parlor Room right now. Thank you.
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