Gary Klein

speaker

51 appearances 5 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard May 2025

Gary Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update) · 21 May 2025 podcast

They'll say, we want to be harmonious, so we're going to make decisions where everybody agrees. A harmonious decision is a terrible idea because that means that everybody has a veto. And so your chance of coming up with an innovation has been severely compromised.

I am guilty of the delusion that we can have harmonious decisions. And despite personal experience, I hold on to this goal.

I do not do it when I make lots of decisions. And so I don't do it automatically.

Okay, so there's a couple of things that I might do with them. First of all, we would want to run some premortems. to inject a healthy dose of reality. Not that I don't think they have that. A second is, are they going to be able to pivot based on what they learn? Or are they going to get locked into a business model and not be resilient or flexible as things develop? Because things will develop.

Their plan is not going to continue as they've originally designed it, simply because they're nobody is smart enough to come up with a perfect plan right off the bat. So you do want to make discoveries and you do want to be able to pivot and maybe even make massive changes in your business model.

I mean, if you do some sort of pre-mortem, you might say, what are the things that we might have to adapt for in part to build a more resilient organization?

Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 3: Grit vs. Quit (Update) · 16 May 2025 podcast

It's a question of what kind of resources you have, what's your tolerance for pain, what are the alternatives. There's that kind of reluctance to admit that you've wasted all of these resources.

We don't want to discourage entrepreneurs from trying things out, even though the chances of success are so low. It's not a good gamble for the entrepreneurs, but it's good for our society.

Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 2: Life and Death (Update) · 14 May 2025 podcast

I don't think we should enjoy failure. I think failure needs to burn on us.

I'm very impressed by it. I'm impressed because it's sophisticated. It's not simplistic. There's a variety of levels and a variety of reasons. And before we start making policies about what to do about failure, we need to look at things like her spectrum and identify what kind of a failure is it so that we can formulate a more effective strategy.

Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 1: The Chain of Events (Update) · 9 May 2025 podcast

Facebook wasn't the first thing I built. I also built chat systems and games, study tools and music players, and I'm not alone. J.K. Rowling got rejected 12 times before she finally wrote and published Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo.

I think they tend to be cliches. And my negative reaction to them is it's pretending that we should learn to enjoy failure. And I don't think we should enjoy failure. I think failure needs to burn on us. When I talk to people, I want to find out if they're experts. One of the things I ask them is, can you tell me about the last mistake you made?

And some people, a surprising number of people say, I can't think of any mistakes. But the people I think are the real experts, they can tell you because those mistakes have been bothering them for the last couple of weeks or

I think it does. I think the failure stories tend not to be advertised as well. People who had those stories aren't in a position to go on the lecture circuit or write books.

I think it would, but we don't want to discourage entrepreneurs from trying things out, even though the chances of success are so low. It's not a good gamble for the entrepreneurs, but it's good for our society.

Failure is an inability to accomplish important goals that you have set out for yourself.

There are people who say we should learn to enjoy failure and use failure and not respond negatively to it. I don't agree with that. I think it needs to be a negative emotionally. The value of failure is it forces us to reexamine our assumptions and to revise our concepts of how things work or can fall apart.

I think that's exactly accurate, that in many organizations, people don't want to admit their own failures because it'll reflect poorly on them, and they don't want to call out their colleagues because that's going to disrupt the harmony.

And so they avoid it, or they just find some ways to redirect the focus of the team in another direction so they don't have to confront how this failed and why it failed.

That feels right. I would accept that analysis.

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