Rita McGrath
speaker
126 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 8 Jun
Rita McGrath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It is. It is. So can I tell you one of my favorite stories about this? This is a story of the Postal Service, which is an unlikely place to look for, you know, really interesting management innovations, but so be it. So I had a gentleman in my class who worked for the Postal Service and The branch that he was manager of had this giant analog machine.
It would sort and stack and people knew how to use it. And it sort of occupied the middle of the facility. And everybody that was in the place worked with this machine. And they decided that they needed to become more digital. And this big machine was going to get replaced by a bunch of smaller units that could do more specific things.
And it was going to cost less and it would be less vulnerable to breakdowns and everything. So the machine was supposed to be decommissioned over the course of a weekend. So you can imagine his surprise when Thursday night, a group of his people come to him and he said, boss, yeah, well, we want to talk to you about the machine. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we spent months on this.
We've talked, we've all agreed. You've all said it was good. And the people said to him, oh yeah, yeah, we get it. We're totally, we're ready to move on. It's just, you know, that machine has been a big part of our lives for a long period of time. A lot of us started working here when we were 18, you know, and that machine has been there every day.
It's just, you know, and it's going to be a big change for us. And they said, well, we want to say goodbye. And he's like, you want to say goodbye to a machine? They said, yeah. So they decided they wanted to have an Irish wake.
The next night, the next night. It was amazing. There were people giving speeches. There were people like screwing off little pieces of the machine to take home as keepsakes. But I've always thought that was a really lovely story because it represents both sides. You know, it represents the sadness of having to give up something that you've
that's been part of who you are for a long time, and the need to do that and move on.
Yeah, so the thing was called Pure, if I remember properly. And the original concept for it was that there would be this huge market of providing safe drinking water in places which didn't have reliable access to it.
But, you know, it's really hard, I think, if you've always lived your life in a developed country where you open the tap and safe drinking water comes out to really understand the day to day circumstances of people who don't have that luxury. And what they came to realize was that if they tried to do this thing as a commercial enterprise.
That it was going to be very difficult for the people living in those areas to access it because safe water was just one of their problems, right? They were, you know, there's sanitation concerns, there's other health concerns, and they've got so little resources that to take what little they had and spend it on safe water, you know, maybe you'll just take the risk.
So it wasn't, they banged away at it for a while, but it just became clear that unless a government took an interest or an NGO took an interest, that it just wasn't going to be a commercial enterprise.
But then I believe it was a series of natural disasters that they were able to basically go in as a charity and say, hey, look, we will donate this, you know, to keep people from getting terrible illnesses and whatnot. And that then did attract the attention of the NGO community, of the governmental community.
And it became, I wouldn't say a wildly profitable business for them, but at least a viable business for them.
Yes. Well, and, you know, if you're helping a government look after their people, they're going to be much more willing to have a conversation with you about what other products you might introduce in their country.
Well, I think when we innovate, right, we have a tendency to make up in our heads what the right solution is, right? So if I've got a problem with elderly people not able to drive, then autonomous cars is the solution. But instead, what I find with successful entrepreneurs and innovators, they tend to carve out a problem space for themselves that could be open to multiple solutions.
And I think we often forget that, that there's lots of ways of making something happen that don't necessarily involve a whiz-bang technology or whatever. And in fact, in many cases, you're better off not having that.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think, you know, so much of the human journey, we don't like to think about this, but a lot of it is serendipity and chance. And did the right person speak up for you at the right time? And did you happen to live in the right zip code? You know, a lot of what we end up experiencing. doing in life has that flavor to it.
And so I think the inflection points really come when, you know, big moments like you go off to school and there's a whole new group of people that you meet, or your family moves and there's another social setting that you're in, or you lose a job and it turns out maybe that wasn't such a bad thing, or you get a job and who expected that? And you prove to be really good at it.
So I think in personal life, we have the opportunity to really think about inflection points. You want to think about these things as what I'll call options. An option is a relatively small investment you're making today that buys you the right, but not the obligation to make a bigger investment in the future. And we do this in real life all the time, right?
So we go to school, we invest in a skill building course, we agree to go to a training program. We do these things, not that we know exactly what's going to happen, but we think it'll create opportunities in the future.
Showing 101–120 of 126 · page 6 of 7
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