Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Elise Hu. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Today's talk is about two types of personalities that show up in business and how important it is to have both in order to make big projects work. In our 2023 talk from TED at BCG, culture strategist Beth Viner breaks down how to build teams that don't just stream up big possibilities, but can make them a reality too. After the break.
Some of the best relationships in the world are made up of individuals who are the yin to the other's yang.
Chapter 2: What are the two types of personalities important for business success?
You're either the person who stacks the dishwasher with creative, reckless abandon, or you're the one who, correctly, thinks of it as a very competitive game of Tetris. And rather than what might be a series of expletives as you restack the plates, it's the Tetris stacker coming to some appreciation for the haphazard where the tension breaks. And that's a beautiful thing.
And you might even get a few extra clean plates out of it. This scenario isn't just true in our personal relationships. It's true in relationships across institutions and organizations of all types. Bridging this tension, I believe that that is the key to organizations continuing to build, grow and make new and different things. This is the story of two different kinds of people coming together.
Zero-to-one humans and their one-to-end counterparts. Zero-to-one humans, they're dreamers. I love this about them. They're founders of companies, creative inventors. They thrive in the fogginess of problems, looking for nonlinear solutions. And to their counterparts, they often seem untethered to reality. which is true, and also how they find new opportunities.
It's why I think they're really good at what they do, but it is a core tension with those around them. One to end humans, these are the doers. They build companies and ensure their success over long periods of time. They're the glue that keeps it together. I've been a dreamer, but I've also been a doer at varying points along my own career journey.
And in my day job, I help organizations see and harness the value of both kinds of people to build new things. How the zero-to-one dreamers can be just spiky enough that the organization doesn't reject that entrepreneurial talent, and how the one-to-end doers can support their move-fast-and-break-things counterparts being their guides to the ins and outs of the organization.
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Chapter 3: How can dreamers and doers work together effectively?
Finding a way to bridge this tension, that's the key to organizations being able to both keep on keeping on while building and capturing new growth. One of the easiest ways to bridge this tension, it's to get buy-in. Not with gestures or words, but with cold, hard cash. I was talking to my friend Alex. She and Jordana, they're dreamers.
They co-founded Lola, a feminine health reproductive company. And when they launched as a direct-to-consumer, they just had a single product, tampons. And everything they did those first few years was focused on that, developing a product, packaging, marketing, pricing, distribution, building a site, a community, getting investors, hiring an incredible team of startup talent.
And they did that all to build a product that was safer for women to put inside her body. They got great traction. They found those incredible investors, also some endorsers, influencers, who all really liked them. Women really liked them. Somewhere along the way, they realized that in order to have the level of impact that they wanted in the world, they couldn't just be a single product.
After all, direct-to-consumer, it's a channel, not a business. They had to figure out how to crack retail, how to get that box of tampons onto the physical and virtual shelves at Amazon, Walmart, Target. And despite having this incredible team of startup talent, they did not have decades of lived retail sales experience. They had to hire in those people, the doers, from outside.
And they definitely did not come from the startup world, but they absolutely knew how to get that product into that retail store. You can probably see where this is going. So maybe to save you a little bit of anxiety, it didn't blow up in their faces. Because Alex and Jordana, well, they're pretty smart. They did all the things that you and I both know to manage that kind of change in tension.
Building respect, learning and development, internal communication. But the thing that made it all work right away between the dreamers and the doers ... money.
They tied the compensation, in this case in the form of shares and stock options, of that new retail sales team, not just to their ability to put product in retail stores, but to the full performance of the business, DTC and retail, and vice versa. And that made all the other things, building relationships, cross-business line sharing, internal communications, happen.
just at a much more rapid rate. So make sure to get buy-in and use money. I'm also a fan of a corporate mosh pit. Zero-to-one humans, the dreamers, they tend to move a little bit more quickly than those around them. And it's often implicit that they are there to break existing norms, processes and paths to previous success. But I've seen organizations forget
that on the other side of those norms, processes and paths are humans, the doers. They tweak existing products. They probably train whole parts of your organizations in new service protocols. Building a corporate mosh pit, well, it requires acknowledging those who are explicitly not like you, be they doers or dreamers.
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