Anne Morriss

Hello, everyone.

Welcome back to a brand new season of Fixable from the TED Audio Collective.

I'm your host, Anne Morris.

I'm a company builder and leadership coach.

Happy New Year to all of our fixtures 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 want to join us to solve some problems together.

Really, this is our idea of a good time.

We're at a point in our lives where we are not fighting it anymore.

No more.

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.

Yeah, this is insight that got you tenure at the Harvard Business School.

Oh, that's a whole other episode, my dear.

All right.

We'll wait till the marry up episode.

But yeah, what we want to 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

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 feel like this is an idea that people really need to touch and feel to internalize.

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.

I love that because we, you know, what am I not going to do?

That is like a famous definition of strategy.

But what we hear a lot less about is what am I going to do but not do very well?

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

It's more difficult, quite honestly.

The other example that brings this to life for me is the impossible triangle.

So tell us about the impossible triangle.

I remember this from when we renovated our kitchen.

And that's intuitive because I got to hire more people and get them to work after hours and that shit is not free.

Right.

And it's our shorthand for saying you think delusionally that you can be great at everything.

And we know from the science that that is physically impossible.

Yes.

So the moment of truth that I think about a lot is Herb Kelleher, 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 to

And this was a very big decision because— This is a moment of truth.

This is a poignant moment of truth.

Totally, because they're in this cutthroat game with all these other airlines, and all the other airlines are providing the service.

All the other airlines are going to transfer your bags.

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.

But in return, we're going to 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, right?

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.

That's the breathtaking part of it.

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.

I just want to underscore that.

Like just dial it up.

You have to, because if you start to like waver even a little bit-

It gets amplified through the rest of the organization.

Okay, so say I'm convinced, I'm ready to get in touch with my inner herb, and I want to do this for my own organization.

Where do I start in bringing this kind of thinking into the system?

I think you start with your customers.

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?

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, like we work through all of these things.

We bring in some external data.

We're confident in the list.

What's my next move?

Yeah.

Exactly.

The order you're suggesting here is start at the top.

Where do I want to win?

And then reverse engineer.

What do I have to give up in order to get there?

So where do companies tend to get stuck in kind of bringing this more strategic use of resources to life inside the system?

Oh, it's so good.

I mean, we do it just to get through the day.

And you're going to take that away from me too in this conversation?

All right.

So let me ask you a question that we get all the time.

How does this approach apply to individuals?

We had that same arc when we started doing this work and writing about it.

We were like, oh shit, this might explain everything.

Yeah, the home front is a great one.

So you often talk about working moms as an example, and I just feel this one.

But you're a better messenger for this.

Too close to home for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you can see this whole spectrum in the drop-off line.

Yeah.

No one at the PTA meeting has their roots done.

Yeah.

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.

But we really get into the step-by-step on how you do this.

When we were writing that book, we were like, okay, well, we got to 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.

At all.

They did not value complicated meals.

Like, more chicken nuggets, please.

They...

did want us to be present when we were home.

Like, when we were with them, they wanted us to be 100% present.

They didn't want us to be checking email in the bathroom.

Again, hypothetical.

Hypothetical.

And the trade-offs, when 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 maybe spending less time on the 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 when we were home, be totally present.

And listen, these schools are run by volunteers, but often that volunteer burden is not equitably distributed.

And I made the wrong choice for our family by really leaning into that part of my obligation.

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

And the irony is you were doing it for our kids.

Oh, no, that was a story in my head for sure.

Yeah.

This is for you, honey.

Well, yeah.

Things went a little awry on the governance front.

But yes, that is a true statement.

There were some midnight board meetings.

I love that we started the season this way because I also want us to be able to refer back to this conversation.

Yeah.

Because what's interesting is 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 going to 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?

And Frances, I have to tell you, we're going to be writing about it in the fourth book, too.

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

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 at fixable at ted.com or 234-FIXABLE.

That's 234-349-2253.

Yeah, please keep communicating.

Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries.

It's hosted by me, Anne Morris.

And me, Frances Fry.

This episode was produced by Rahima Nassa from Pushkin Industries.

Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Daniela Balareso, and Roxanne Heilash.

And our show was mixed by Louie at StoryYard.