Ted Audio Collective Hello everyone, this is After Hours.
I'm Felix. I'm Mihir.
And I'm Francis. Francis Fry.
It's great to have you.
You haven't been on After Hours in forever, right?
In forever. You know, I wait by the phone.
Yeah, right. It's so good to have you, Francis.
For our listeners who don't know, she's a colleague at HBS and the author of some great books, Uncommon Service, Unleashed with her considerably better half, Anne Morris.
Sorry, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
No, it's totally true.
And we are so excited to have you.
Welcome. Thank you.
Yeah, and we brought fabulous topics as well.
What do you have for us, Mihir?
Well, so part of the reason we're so excited to have Francis is she's starting a new podcast on the TED network about workplace problems.
So, Felix, I thought what better opportunity to talk to Francis about why workplace problems are so vexing and so hard.
So I thought we could talk about that.
What did you bring, Felix?
That sounds fantastic.
I would like to get your take on Chisinda Ardern's surprising message that she will step down as the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
She seemed so successful and so in charge, and I'm curious what you make of it.
I love both of those topics, and I was equally surprised when she stepped down.
And that will be a pleasure to learn your perspectives on.
Let's do it. So, Mihir, workplace problems.
Yeah. So, Francis, you've decided to start this podcast with Anne called Fixable, which is kind of a call -in show for workplace problems.
And I'm curious why this kind of a show now?
I want to democratize access to our knowledge because I'm tired of the same problems being the same problems.
I'd like us to graduate to new problems.
And so those for which we know the answers, I want to pass around the secret memos on how to do it.
Why these problems, I think, was accelerated by the pandemic.
We all got a little thinner in our ability to absorb workplace trauma, capital T, small t.
Yeah. And it was the workplace interactions that were the key to it.
And so it's workplace problems, but it's of the interpersonal nature.
It's when I'm doing something that's getting in the way or our interaction is doing something that's getting in the way.
And so we learned that when we would solve a problem for one person, co -produce the solution with them for their context, it turns out that other people observing that, it's not just voyeurism, they get to learn how to solve a problem and curate it to themselves.
We're trying to spread two messages.
One is that these things are fixable.
You needn't endure this.
Sometimes people have been enduring for a week, a month, but then there's a year and a decade.
So one is you needn't endure.
And two, it takes about 30 minutes to fix it.
The progress we can make in 30 minutes can indeed change the lives of someone.
Why can we do it? Because we're old and we've seen so much and we've had enough.
That definitely rings true.
I'm curious, this notion that there's a set of problems that exist out there.
They're very common and they don't go away over time and yet we know how to fix them.
What's your favorite example?
Oh goodness. I can't get the best out of my team because they don't care enough, because they're lazy.
I have some negative attributions to others and that's why I can't get the best out of them.
And so what's the fix for that?
The common ingredient is you.
Not them. So we're going to sprinkle magic dust, but not on them.
We're going to sprinkle it on you.
And we're going to open your eyes to your own participation and we're going to write some things in your own mind that will manifest to your behavior.
And then these other people who we had these negative thoughts about all of a sudden, oh my gosh, they're behaving so much better and they didn't change.
I changed. And is that pattern of people seeing problems in their environment, but really it being a manifestation of our own problems?
More than 50 % of it is we have a two -dimensional caricature of others when we see others as their true three -dimensional being and understand our own agency.
It's way more than 50 % of the time.
That's the issue. And you know, it's inviting somebody to put on a pair of glasses with a new lens.
Once you see it this way, you can't unsee it.
But we're not born knowing these things.
So I don't condemn anyone for having the problem.
We're just offering the new prescriptions.
One thing that strikes me as so interesting about this context is some problems having to do with how people behave, how engaged they are, how easy it is to bring them along.
I find actually quite challenging and quite tricky.
I recently had a conversation with someone whose team was very good at what they do, but not so open to new ideas.
And you go back and forth, and I have a few examples of companies that have managed to change that, but it didn't strike me as a trivial problem.
And then on the other hand, on Reddit, I'm following a subreddit called Antiwork.
And people basically post behavior of their managers.
And some of that behavior is just the worst thing you can possibly imagine.
And what's fascinating to me is there is a core of issues that I think are really hard to tackle and complicated issues.
And then just for so many others, it's just be a little nice.
Don't be a diverse person on the planet.
That subreddit will disappear tomorrow if people are just like mildly nice to one another.
If we had somebody on the show that's not who's being written about it, somebody who's writing, oh, this is what my boss did.
They're really bad.
In our conversation with them, we would find perhaps how they're not setting that person up for success.
So many times we want more empathy from someone else, but we're judging them, not developing them.
And if I'm judging you, your empathy will dissipate.
So what we find in this is that we have a lot more agency.
It's the context that sets it up.
I wonder if part of what's also going on here is these problems are so vexing because people want so much from work is what's going on here that people want to have work fulfill so much of their needs that then they problematize it in a way that sounds terrible to say.
As I say it, I know it sounds terrible.
It's like this great Toni Morrison essay in the New Yorker.
It's half a page. And it's about a conversation with her father where the father's advice was something like your work is important, but it is not who you are.
In my experience, that is not the cause of the problem in any meaningful way.
And it could just be in my experience, but I don't think we have too high of expectations for our engagement.
We're looking for dignity and respect and honor and fairness.
And so I don't feel like the bar is too high.
There's pebbles that are in the way that when we're aware of them, we can sweep them out of the way.
Like I don't find there's boulders in the way all the time.
But the difference between a boulder and a pebble is only clear when you can see them.
Otherwise, you're just stuck.
Yeah, I wonder if the flip is also true.
We hear that companies expect so much of employees today.
You have to be all in.
It has to be the center of your life.
Yeah, when companies have these high expectations, they really have a misguided idea of what creates optimal performance.
So they're frequently wrong, but never in doubt.
So they're instilling you got to do this, this and this.
Their calculus is wrong, but their confidence is absolute.
And so that, to me, is the mismatch I see is that you have to be at your desk all the time, because that's how I'll know you're committed.
That's, as you know, an insane way to assess whether or not somebody is committed and an insane way to get ideal performance.
And yet, that's what people are holding on to.
That takes us to your other passion and how it intersects with these issues, I think, which is you're in the operations and technology unit at HBS.
I think of you as somebody who really appreciates technology.
And I'm curious what you think is the intersection of the way technology is operating in the workplace with these issues.
So if you just think about Slack channels or Zoom calls or virtual meetings or devices, are those technologies enabling us to have more comfortable workplace situations or are they actually creating more problems?
I think that they have the potential to be wildly helpful.
I'll take an older technology.
Remember when email came around and your listeners probably can't, they just always had it, but I think we can.
And it was revolutionary that we could communicate in that way.
Well, if I asked you today how much of email is a blessing versus a curse, it's far more of a mixed reaction.
And so I think that the technology has the capacity to, but we can't let the technology transcend its purpose and we have to take action when it's not.
I would probably put a technological limit on reply all and just not permitted because it causes so much more harm than good, but was really helpful in the beginning.
So I'm in an office that's got a lot of technology in it and I adore it, but I don't let the technology transcend the purpose.
I'm not driven by the functionality of the technology.
The technology slots in to be incredibly helpful.
And Slack and things like that can be helpful, but if you go and talk to a hundred companies, way more than 50, you're going to tell you it does more harm than good.
Now the creators of it will say, oh, but you can use it well.
And I just think that these things are tools.
You can't just let them go in the wild and hope they're going to work out.
They're not. Yeah. These Slack channels, if that's really true, like that's amazing and kind of terrible.
And part of the answer may be exactly what you said, which is that they're not being deployed correctly.
But it also gives me pause to think about that.
When you think about our more ambivalent response to email now, it has a lot to do with the ease with which it can be sent.
So it's a big tax on your time and it costs the sender almost nothing.
The trajectory of technology is, of course, to make communication even more convenient, even more embedded, driving the cost ever lower.
It's never good when it was immediate.
I'd like you to take a breath.
I don't want to hear your first thought.
Yeah. Once email will be written by AI essentially, we will get flooded with messages that we don't have the capacity to read.
Oh, we'll have AI for reading it too.
It's not just going to be for writing it.
I hope you're right that eventually maybe I don't even have to show up at work because AI will do everything.
This is why my only pure communication form is text.
It's I have your phone number.
You have my phone number and I can text you.
It's shorthand. It's personal to personal.
But I check my email at most once a day.
I can just attest to Francis's expert texting because I recently received a text from Francis with emojis and one of my daughters declared it a masterpiece of emoji usage.
Okay. So Francis, if our listeners have questions, when will the podcast begin?
It will begin in March and we're very much looking forward to it and there'll be all kinds of ways.
But if they wanted to get in touch now with a problem, they can just email.
Why don't you give us your phone number and they can test you.
It'll be great. I'll go with email fixable at ted .com.
Excellent. For anyone that wants to do it.
And here's the thing, we will help solve your problem and we will stay in touch with you afterwards to do it.
I love it. All right.
That sounds great. Felix, you brought with us Jacinda Ardern.
Why is she so interesting to you?
Well, part of it was just a surprise because looking from afar, I had a sense that she was a very successful politician.
In particular, COVID management, if you look at the numbers, New Zealand is among the countries that managed relatively well.
Not quite as good as Australia or Korea when you look at the per capita deaths, but still like a fairly successful transition.
I first really just admired her when she responded to the Christchurch massacre.
I think the way she handled that situation was just so incredibly inspiring.
I was in awe. And I then discovered more recently that her poll numbers had slipped.
It was not completely clear whether she would be reelected.
But for most politicians, I would have thought, given these probabilities, of course, you would go for reelection.
And so I wanted to get your reaction in particular on the reason why she left.
Let's listen for a moment.
I am leaving because with such a privileged role comes responsibility.
The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not.
I know what this job takes.
And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice.
It's that simple. Is it?
Here's what I love about that.
The calculus that I think everyone else is doing is would I be the best in this job?
She's not saying she wouldn't be the best.
And arguably, is she going to get elected again?
I mean, if you ask me, probably, is she the best person for the job?
Probably. But that's not her bar.
Her bar is I wouldn't be able to do the job justice.
And so when you make it an absolute bar as opposed to a relative bar, that's the part that has struck me like she doesn't think she can do it to her full capacity and is almost unbothered by the relative notion.
And if you look at like we say to all of our politicians, oh, my gosh, don't retire because who else are we going to have?
And so then we end up with ancient politicians.
And she's retiring at age 42, if I'm not mistaken, which is just startling, Frances.
It is. But I have to say I'm super inspired by it.
So I've been inspired by her the whole time.
She builds trust with people all across the globe in just astounding ways.
And then who knows who's going to develop in her wake?
Because when she takes the job, even if she's there's nobody better at the time, nobody better is developing either.
So I can't express to you how much I wish more people would do this.
Yeah, what was your take me here?
I guess a little bit more mixed.
I too think that the way somebody exits the stage is really inspiring.
Most people do a horrible job at designing exit.
Exit is something we don't study that much.
We talk about how to get to a place.
We don't talk about how to leave a place.
And she is exiting on her terms.
And I think that's fantastic.
You know, having said that, I think there are layers to the story.
And obviously, we're extrapolating widely.
We see one data point and everybody's like looking at this Rorschach ink blot and seeing different things.
So the first piece of it that is striking is the angle on gender.
We just don't have that many female political leaders.
She is seemingly quite successful.
And then inevitably this story takes on a gendered tone.
The second is youth.
She is young. She's 42 and she's already been prime minister for six years.
I was thinking about this ridiculous specials song.
I don't know if you ever like the specials.
There's like the greatest ska band ever.
The name of the song is Too Much Too Young.
I worry about people who succeed remarkably so early.
And I wonder if she and the world would have been better off if she had succeeded later.
So there's a gender aspect to this.
I think there's an age aspect to this.
And then the final one is, is this the death of ambition?
Is there something generational going on about ambition?
Does any of that resonate with you?
The part I picked up on is when you worry about, but you're not worried for her.
She's going to be just fine.
She's going to be totally fine.
I would love for people to do things for the period of their life that made sense and that by doing it once didn't mean you had to do it forever.
I do find that people have a very hard time from moving on gracefully, which is why we wait until we're exited.
My reaction was maybe not so dissimilar from yours.
First, I also thought, oh my God, this is amazing.
And I wish half of Congress and the president would have similar intuition because we are in a situation now in not everywhere, but in many democracies where the difference between people who presumably make decisions for the future.
And the people who will actually experience that future.
It's just absurd. The idea that I can know what will be best for people who will live 40, 50 years longer than I will, it's a real dysfunction in the U .S.
political system. And so in that sense, I was super pleased.
On the one hand, you can see she steps down because she knows she's amazing.
But, you know, there are lots of amazing people.
And if it comes from this place of humility that you have really special talents and so do many other people and it's really competitive in most political systems.
And so someone else will come and they will not be her, but they will bring other qualities to New Zealand politics.
And presumably that's a very good thing.
So that's the positive side.
And then I didn't think about ambition me here, but I thought about tenacity.
Are there moments in life and in professional lives when you feel like giving up and when I feel like giving up is maybe not the right temptation to give into.
Because sometimes I've had these experiences when I had moments where I thought, why bother?
Really, in the end, it's not so much about me in the first place.
I'm trying to do this really meaningful thing.
And if the world conspires against me, the world can maybe figure it out without me and probably they will.
And then there's something about pulling through that can, I think, be both a really enriching experience for you as an individual and sometimes probably do some good for the company and the world also.
Yeah. I feel like we're dancing around a little bit of the gendered nature of the discussion around this decision.
So we are in some sense characterizing her as not having enough gumption and not enough ambition or tenacity.
And maybe that is a very male centered way to think about it.
I'm curious, Felix, what's your response to me here?
Because you had your thought bubble was going.
So I don't think that the tenacity question is a gendered question.
I have so many former students now who I see changing jobs very quickly, and it's both men and women.
When you look at how long CEOs are in their jobs, anyone who makes an investment decision that has a decent span of life, almost no CEO experiences how things will actually turn out.
Because by the time the results of the investment come in, in all expectations you have moved on.
And so my sense is actually that we're all constantly on the move.
And as a result, we don't live with the consequences of what we do.
And I understand if you look at lifetime distributions of CEOs, there is a core group of CEOs who stay on very, very long.
And interestingly, their performance, stellar.
And you might say, oh, this is, of course, the reason why they stay on.
But it might run in both directions that actually over time, you really get to know your business, you really get to understand where investment opportunities are.
And as a result, tenure and tenacity have something really positive.
What do you make of this, Frances?
I think that the gender part to me that plays out is her desperation for being with her five -year -old.
I don't hear it as much from dads.
Like wanting to be there at the school bus.
So that felt gendered to me in it.
I can't think of very many men.
Michael Jordan is one of them though.
That doesn't come back when you know the tank is going to be less full.
Like he knew with a different coach, his tank wasn't going to be his full.
He wasn't going to be able to do the game of basketball justice.
So she reminds me of him in that regard.
I think the other piece of this, which I'm curious if you have this sense and it goes Felix to your comment about people moving on.
I have had this spate of former students, mid to late 40s, has done extremely well.
And he's basically now looking to step out of it and create a portfolio where they're like on a board and where they're doing some other stuff.
And I confess, I react to that and I'm just like, really?
You're in your mid to late 40s and you're in the sweet spot of your career and you kind of want to step back.
Disproportionately women?
You know, I hadn't thought about it.
Maybe, I don't know.
I have the conversation, but it's disproportionately women that I find doing it.
Exactly. To put up with crap at work when you're a 50 year old woman and you've been successful is like such a hard decision to make.
And I'm talking about the Knicks, the hallway dehumanizing stuff.
It's just harder. Like, why do it?
Why do it? So, I have many similar conversations just like you and me here.
And it's sometimes connected to thinking about the economy and economic opportunities and job opportunities as a lottery.
If you can win really quickly and then get out as early as you possibly can.
I recently met someone barely out of high school, really.
He has an interesting idea for real estate investments.
And I think the idea is really interesting, what he would like to do.
And I think it could potentially be a fabulous business.
But his sole motivation was to be rich enough by 25 that he doesn't have to work.
And that's the part that troubles me.
No chance he's going to be happy.
I mean, you're putting too much on being rich and happy.
And this is the other thing that the Jacinda Arden thing, like, I think crystallizes in my mind.
Like, I feel like when I read that story, I was like, it was a repeat of those conversations in a weird way.
The other thing that, of course, we can forget is, yes, I think, you know, likelihood she'll have these wonderful moments where she's waiting at the school bus.
But that's not all she's going to do.
I mean, we just know that many plans she has and the big role she will play.
So characterizing it as a complete exit, I will be so surprised if that was actually right.
I agree. She is too good.
Again, like Michael Jordan, look what he did after he.
That to me is the parallel I make.
Well, so let's put our bets down.
I'm going to go with UN Secretary General.
What do you think? I think she's going to achieve more than that.
Nice. I like it. Felix, what do you think?
Any guesses? The UN feels very bureaucratic.
I don't know if she's aimed for the UN, but I wouldn't be surprised if she played a really big role in international relations.
I'm reminded of the really beautiful press conference she had with the Prime Minister of Finland.
Yeah. And that vision of international collaboration and both countries working together could accomplish something along those lines.
I don't know exactly what the role is, but something in international relations, I think would be really fabulous for her and then fabulous for the rest of it as well.
And we'll have recommendations, of course, me here.
What do you have for us?
Yeah. So I have two because I missed a week.
So sorry about that.
Oh, no, no, no. You're shifting over from one episode to the next.
And technically one of them is an update, which is the first recommendation I ever gave on after hours and possibly my best ever was Dark Sky, which is a weather app.
And it was my favorite weather app.
And I am sorry to report to those of you who adopted Dark Sky.
Apple bought it about a year and a half ago and they shut it down, which is terrible and criminal.
Yeah. Unclear. But they said they incorporated Dark Sky into their own weather app, which was always terrible.
I am here to say I'm just deeply disappointed in Apple and I'm here to say that Carrot, C -A -R -R -O -T, is the next best weather app for you.
The second thing I want to recommend is I have a tradition of recommending really weird British game shows.
So University Challenge and Only Connect.
They are both extremely hard and you feel dumb watching them, which is great.
But I have another one, which is Richard Osman's House of Games.
Richard Osman is this complete character in Britain.
He's like one of these people you just want to spend time with.
It's like Stephen Fry or something.
And he has this lovely game show called House of Games where they have weird, quirky games.
It's totally on YouTube.
I recommend it as another British game show for you to watch.
Felix, what do you got?
I have a culinary pick.
And as you both know, I love going out.
If I could go out to restaurants almost every night, I probably would.
And generally speaking, when I cook myself, I find it's not really that simple to create dishes that rival the professionally prepared food that you get in good restaurants.
But it's not always true.
And one of the things that I think my version is actually better than at least for sure the average version of a restaurant dish or even can maybe compete at the very top is baba ganoush.
I love baba ganoush.
It's so simple to make.
It's basically roasted eggplant.
And that's about it.
And I find there's two little twists that really will catapult anyone's baba ganoush in through the top lead.
The first one is after you roasted it, put it in the fridge overnight and make sure that you drain all the juices from the roasted eggplant.
So it becomes a little thicker.
It gets a little thicker and less bitter.
If you have it in a restaurant, it often has this bitter note.
And that's just because they're rushing it.
So if you do it late at night, you roast your eggplant, you put them in the fridge.
Oh my God, you're in business.
If you grow up in the Middle East, mostly it's roasted over the gas stove.
And that is maybe not everybody's cup of tea.
But it does add some depth to the flavor of the roasted eggplant.
But you really want to stand there at the gas grill with your tongs and then try to do it right now.
They have these little grills that you can put on top of your gas stove and you just place your eggplant there.
And in the show notes will link to it.
It's fantastic. It's sort of like the sweet combination between I didn't grow up with a grandmother who spent a lot of time in the Middle East.
But technology will help.
And it's this little contraption that you can do so you get perfectly roasted eggplant.
Let it sit in the fridge and you'll be in heaven the next day.
I mean, Frances, do you have a sense that Felix should write a cookbook?
I was going to say just so I can get the audio for it.
I'm not even sure I need to see the printed.
I mean, I will never, ever, ever eat baba ganoush.
And I could have listened to you for hours.
Hours. So yes, I'm here.
Absolutely. Okay. So, Frances, you could plug your podcast if you'd like as your recommendation.
No, I'm not going to do that.
Instead I want to recommend a book.
It's available for pre -order, but it comes out in February called An Urgent Life.
And it's written by Bozema St.
John, who is just exquisite and extraordinary for many, many reasons.
So she's chief marketing officer of Extraordinaire.
I met her when we both got to Uber the same week in 2017.
So we both like burning buildings.
Nice. And we found ourselves on the doorstep of one at the same time.
The book is about, she and her husband learned of her husband's terminal diagnosis.
And he had just a few months to live.
And it was very sudden.
And it was how they lived their life for those remaining months.
And then how she has adopted the mantra of living life urgently.
And I'm very much on the move fast and fix things side of the fence.
Like I don't like move fast and break things, but that doesn't mean you should slow down.
You should still move fast, but you should fix them.
And so we collide in this appreciation of urgency.
She doesn't take days off.
And every single day she is living life urgently.
And the book is just beautifully written.
And I think it'll be inescapable to not live your life more urgently as a result of reading it.
So that's my recommendation.
Wow. That sounds fantastic.
I feel so trivial now.
I feel like Richard Osman's House of Games.
Geez, me here. That's a beautiful recommendation.
It's all in the balance.
Yeah, exactly. This is it for today.
You were listening to After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.
It's been a while since I've been here.
