Afford Anything - Why Does Every Good Idea Die in a Meeting? – with HBS Prof Linda Hill and Jason Wild

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

#724: Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor, and Jason Wild, an innovation consultant who has led projects in 40 countries, join us to break down how organizations innovate. Linda and Jason have spent decades studying companies that consistently produce breakthroughs - from Pixar to Delta Airlines to Cleveland Clinic - and they've identified three leadership roles that matter most: the Architect, the Bridger, and the Catalyst. The Architect builds a culture where people feel safe enough to take risks. The Bridger - which Linda calls the "revenge of middle management" - spans the gaps between departments, partners, and outside organizations where innovation often stalls and dies. The Catalyst builds coalitions across broader ecosystems to get things done. We get into what separates co-creation from consensus - and why consensus almost never produces anything great. Linda explains what she calls "creative abrasion": the practice of rubbing ideas against each other through debate and discourse, rather than smoothing over disagreements to keep the peace. We also talk about what individual employees can do when they work inside slow, tradition-bound organizations. The short answer: find the people who share your interests, build a coalition, and work your way up - not by chasing the most powerful person in the room, but by starting with whoever cares about the same problem you do. The conversation touches on AI and what it actually takes to stay relevant as a knowledge worker. Linda and Jason both land on the same answer - the ability to build trust and relationships in low-trust environments is one of the hardest things for AI to replicate. Linda and Jason can be found at geniusatscale.com Download the FIIRE playbook: affordanything.com/FIIRE Timestamps: Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising segments. The provided timestamps are approximate and may be several minutes off due to changing ad lengths. (00:00) Innovation leadership and the ABC framework (02:19) Architect, Bridger, and Catalyst roles (04:18) Studying Pixar and innovation cultures (06:14) Co-creation versus consensus thinking (07:12) Creative abrasion and productive debate (08:41) Bridgers connecting teams and partners (10:50) Delta biometric boarding pass example (12:56) Relationship skills in the AI era (15:40) AI, trust, and human judgment (18:50) Rio collaboration across government silos (22:53) Innovating inside traditional organizations (25:18) ANA teleportation project and coalition building (30:49) Power of questions for innovation (32:42) Shared purpose versus top-down purpose (43:27) Better decision-making through clear criteria Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How do groups innovate, whether it's a small business, a big business, a government, a community organization, how is it that any group of people, any organization can avoid consensus conformist thinking and actually push the envelope, actually innovate in a way that's good? We're going to dive into that today with Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor, and Jason Wilde, an innovation consultant who has led projects in over 40 countries. Linda and Jason have spent decades studying companies that consistently produce breakthroughs. We're talking Pixar, Delta Airlines, Cleveland Clinic, and they have come up with three leadership roles that matter the most. What are they? We're about to find out. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship, acronym, Double I Fire.

And today's episode is about that letter E, entrepreneurship, although the lessons can be applied to anywhere that you work or any organization that you're in, whether it's your neighborhood, PTA, or a Fortune 500 company that you work for. We're going to talk through the ABCs, the architect who builds a culture where people feel safe to take risks, the Bridger, which is the revenge of middle management, you'll hear that described, and the catalyst, the one who builds coalitions. So we're going to talk about what separates creativity from consensus and why consensus never produces anything great. We're going to talk about creative abrasion, the practice of rubbing ideas against each other through debate.

We'll talk about what you can do if you are an individual employee who works inside of a slow tradition-bound organization. And we'll touch on AI and what it actually takes to stay relevant as a knowledge worker. Spoiler alert, if you can build trust and build relationships, especially inside of low trust environments, that's something the AI can't replicate. So to hear a discussion of all of this and more, we welcome Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill and innovation consultant Jason Wilde to the podcast. Hi, Linda. Hi, Jason. Hello, good to be here. Hey, Paula. It's great to be here. I would love to talk to you about the architect, the bridger, the catalyst, the ABC.

Can you describe what those concepts are in the context of business and innovation? The ABCs of innovation are about the following. We are very interested in how do you build organizations that can routinely innovate. And so in that context, we talked about three kinds of leadership roles that need to be fulfilled, not necessarily by one person. The first is you have to architect an organization that has the kind of culture necessary that will allow people to be willing and able to want to innovate because innovation is hard work.

The second, the bridger is that most in organizations, even if they're very large organizations with lots of resources, don't really have all the talent and capabilities inside the organization to do what they want to do. So they often have to partner. So you need to know how to work with other organizations that have their own priorities, their own constraints, etc. And then the catalyst leader is a leader who really understands that,

you know, what's the broader environment or the ecosystem within which we're working? The three roles of leadership, the ABCs, are architecture organization to make sure you can innovate, then figure out how to bridge with partners, and then think about is there a broader ecosystem, other stakeholders you need to bring in? Yeah, and what I would add to that, Paula, is, and I'm a practitioner. So I've led projects, innovation projects, growth projects in 40 countries, from getting generals at NATO to brainstorm and pink post-it notes,

to helping to co-create Disney's future around growth. And, you know, I would see time and again and hundreds of these projects over the years, almost 25 years, really talented people with the right intentions, chasing shiny objects, not getting the results that they want. And, you know, being a practitioner working project to project, it just takes a long time trying to help these people and share some of these patterns that we are seeing. And it kind of hit us, the ABC framework in many ways. Yeah, and I think if I could just add to that, I'm a professor and I'm a professor. and I'm a professor at Harvard Business School, and I chair the leadership initiative at the school. The dean once asked me, Linda, are we developing leaders who know how to lead innovation? Because to be competitive these days, we always need to be coming up with new and useful ways of doing things.

And I ended up sort of saying to him, long story short, that I'm not so sure. So I ended up going out and really looking at leaders who were, this was during the dot-com era, who were building these digital first companies, as we now call them, and trying to understand. how do they think about leadership and how did they behave, sort of allowed their organizations to be so successful. And I accidentally, or I don't know how you describe it, met the person who was at the time the chief technology officer of Pixar. So the first company that I found myself studying was Pixar and understanding why they were able to produce all these hit movies. So I think this architect role was one that I learned about early on when we were looking at that

particular revolution that was happening. And what worried me in part was what we were teaching people about leadership. What we were teaching was true, but it was incomplete. So most people, when they think about being a leader, particularly if you're a founder and you're starting up something, is you think, you know, I have a vision and I want to make sure that vision gets fulfilled. But that is not what leading innovation is about. Leading innovation is actually about creating an environment in which people are willing and able to co-create the future with you. And co-creation really is about the fact that most innovation only happens when you have collaboration across people who have different points of view, different expertise. So people think often, like if they think of a Pixar, of course there were lots of geniuses there, Steve Jobs' other company, to say the least, he's one of the geniuses.

But they always said it's not about the talent. It's actually about how the talent works together that makes the difference. So how do you encourage a culture of co-creation without succumbing, to the tyranny of an overly consensus-based culture or succumbing to design by committee? This is a big issue. And what co-creation really entails is being able to collaborate, experiment, and learn with others who are different in their outlook from your outlook. So what we often do is we actually minimize our differences. We figure out a way to avoid, if you will, talking about that we have different perspectives on how we should handle some

situation or whatever it is. And I think I've come to believe that, I guess most humans do like to avoid conflict. And we actually have a tool we use to measure your capacity as a team or an organization to embrace conflict constructively and deal with it. So what we see in most organizations is either they go towards consensus or they go towards nice. We're polite people. We don't hurt each other's feelings. Go along to get along. Right. So the first capability you need to build, if you want to be an organization that can innovate, is something that we've refer to as creative abrasion. Creative abrasion is, can you create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse?

It's a marketplace. It's a competition of ideas. And unless you can rub ideas against each other, you don't end up with a robust pipeline of ideas really worth testing. Often what we'll do is we will minimize difference. We will either, you know, reach for consensus or whatever it might be, which means we never really have to decide, or we won't even acknowledge it at all. But one of the things I learned at Pixar in my first visits is at Katmel.

talk to me about the fact that you need to amplify difference, not minimize difference, because everyone has the language that they use there. Everybody has a slice of genius. Everybody has talents. Everybody has passions. And you as a leader need to know how to unleash those passions and talents. That capacity is really a key capacity for innovation. Love that, Linda. And Paula, you know, by chance you pick probably two of my least favorite words when you said consensus building. After my least favorite in the corporate world, digital transformation. Through all these projects around the world, I'm yet to find, and I've got a lot to learn, a project that was great, or an outcome that was great that was a result of

consensus building. At best, you get something that's average or mediocre, right? And when you like put that mirror in front of people and you say, who wants to be a part of a mediocre project? Well, obviously nobody. I think it's great that you're focusing on consensus building. And as we talk about the Bridger as one of the ABCs, and the Bridger is really, is a lot of if you would, kind of revenge of middle management. These bridgers really operate in the kill zone, the boundaries of where often innovation dies, a slow death, because many organizations are optimized by functions or teams or geographies.

And so these bridgers are spanning across, you know, these places where it's often that innovation stalls or may end up dying. And these bridgers, and I bring it up, because in many places, middle management is a focus of efficiency and cost reduction, especially for large organizations. But what we found through our research is it's almost a litmus test that these bridgers, where they exist and they're supported and enabled, are creating results that really are outpacing the rest of the competition.

So one of great example is what is the hottest job in tech right now is forward deployed engineer, FDE, Pallenteer and other. you know, were the pioneers of it. And basically, it's a boundary-spanning bridge or role to ensure that the technology platform meets the needs of the customer and they're able to deliver a solution that works for the financial aspect of the business. So they're trying to bring together all of these functions into an outcome that the customer cares about. A lot of that, I think, realization was driven by data

of looking at which projects were succeeding in terms of actual adoption and delivering on the value originally versus the ones that weren't. And what we found was it was the presence of bridgers, but they just weren't calling them or labeling them that way. And so it was data to help us say, okay, hey, this worked for others and you're in a different context, but this is how you can start to supercharge yourself into your future and using data to make those decisive decisions while not defaulting back on consensus building. So real examples, I think, of how people are starting to put this out into real life and in ways that I think are really fascinating.

So when you talk about the Bridger, then, would a synonym for that be a coordinator or is it that type of a function? Bridgers are the people who actually, I don't know, it's more than coordination, and this is actually a piece of the puzzle that we've been looking at. You do need to coordinate, figure out how we actually work together because we work so differently. But the kind of Bridger that we ended up looking at, for instance, was a woman named Nicole, who was at Delta Airlines. And Delta Airlines wanted to figure out how to do a biometric boarding pass

so that we didn't have to carry a piece of paper. We could just show our faces and walk through the airport. So Nicole, who's very much a middle manager, was given responsibility for creating a group that could work with the IT group at Delta, which is very operations oriented. We don't want them to have outages because you and I know we get stuck at airports. They didn't have the capability inside technically to do what they needed to do, so they worked with Clear. We know Clear, right? So Clear had the technology, but they didn't have the capacity to scale it. And so Clear and Delta came together to do this work. Now imagine if you have to have an interface there. Who do you put there to help Clear figure out how to work with IT at Delta and vice versa? And if you really think about the biometric boarding pass, you also got to get TSA to agree. You've got to get a lot of government agencies to agree to this. So you need a person. who actually has what we refer to as, and other people do, emotional intelligence, and what's referred to as contextual intelligence. You can read and map out who do we need to get this done.

How do I begin to build relationships or my team build relationships with all those key parties if you just think about it that are required for us to be able to just show our face and walk onto a plane? That's what bridgers do. What we're hearing is that many organizations are saying we do not have enough bridgers at all, particularly with AI and agentic AI. big issue about not enough bridgers. And again, people who almost even have the stomach to do the detail necessary work of building their relationships across people who normally don't interact

with each other. Right. So the themes that I'm hearing come out, you know, emotional intelligence, building relationships. I'm glad that you brought up AI and agentic AI because we've had a number of interviews that we've aired recently about the question, will I have a job in five years? The recurring theme that keeps coming up over and over is, yes, you may have a job if you have emotional intelligence and you are good at building relationships. And so what's interesting to me about hearing this description of the Bridger, am I correct in my interpretation that I'm hearing that again? Yeah, I think so.

I've had the pleasure and pain of working in AI for almost 20 years. So as a part of my time at IBM was part of the team that helped with Watson. and on Jeopardy and the go to market. So it's been interesting to see just AI go mainstream, especially over the last couple of years. I'm a parent, so I have a range of emotions and share some of the same trepidation. I do subscribe to the notion that asking the question

will AI take your job is not really the right question. I think it's understandable in terms of the emotion and the anxiety. But when you look at it, any job is a set of tasks. some tasks are going to be more likely to be automated than others. But to your point, absolutely relationship building, being really good in world class, creating trust and low trust environments is, I think, going to be extremely important. But at the same time, you have to learn AI as well. I don't think, not that you're implying that.

So one of the things that kind of irks me a little bit is when people talk about adopting AI or AI is a tool. I think it's a little dangerous to just define it as a tool. I mean, this sort of thing is literally going to change almost every aspect of how we live in and work. And this may sound crazy, Paul, but I honestly believe that as much hype as there is, in many ways, we're underhyping how much change is going to happen in the next five to 10 years. And part of it is because when you look at technology, a lot of it is very tangible. You can see it, you can touch it, A PC, you could like unbox it and reverse engineer it. AI is very invisible.

And so the more invisible it is, the greater the risk because it's behind the scenes. So for us to have as humans reactions of fear and trepidation is actually, I think, the right reaction for us to have. Because that hopefully will mean that it will motivate us individually and collectively to then ensure that this incredible technology is leverage for the good of humanity. So at the other extreme, there's this thing called the Eliza Effect, which is from the 1960s that I learned at my time at IBM, which is a human trait of us naturally projecting human characteristics on computer systems. And it's just something very innate. And I think it goes back to us like being able to sleep at night, thinking and believing that we actually understand what's in the black box. So we can get a good night's sleep.

And we really understand it, right? Both of those are kind of dangerous because they kind of limit, I think, the reality and the potential. So I'm a big believer in looking at AI as infrastructure. And infrastructure in the sense that we'll create and enable things that we just can't imagine and even dream up right now. I think the other thing that's going to be very important is to get good at problem solving. The world has always had problems. We just don't have a line of sight to what those problems will be, completely three, five, seven years from now.

So I'm a big believer in getting great at creative problem solving. You say, well, how do you do that? Well, if you strip away the language and the jargon from design thinking, at the core, that's why it exists to be really good at fast learning and creative problem solving. And innovative problem solving in this. And the way we talk about it, you know, as a professor, obviously there's a whole knowledge worker. There's, do we try to stop the students from using AI?

No, I don't think so. That seems like a problem that'll be impossible to solve. You know, I, like, they're going to cheat. They're going to do whatever. Okay, well, as a professor, how do I help them not want to cheat? How do I help them understand what they can get from AI and use it as much as they possibly can just, you know, do what they want to get done and also understand the limits of it? And the other thing about data that I want to be real clear about, we've been doing studies about organizations. Why are some organizations able to get people to adopt these, these new technologies while others aren't. And it turns out that one of the reasons is the language. So it turns out when you say we're going to make data-driven decisions. Logical, data-driven, right? I hate data-driven. Yeah. People resist that because what do you mean? My husband's a physician. You think some people over there who came up with these algorithms know better about how to take care of this child. I'm a pediatric cardiologist for X number of years. Now, I do want to know the data that might tell me, me some ideas about what might be going on here, et cetera, but in the end, this is a human interaction with the child and the parents of the child, right? AI is not replacing that. It's augmenting.

Now, I need to, for me not to use something, so tell me it's data informed. Help me understand why, not data-driven, that I'm supposed to use my judgment, and I'm supposed to use the data to help me, you know, refine my judgment, et cetera, but in the end, this is a sick baby. These are parents who are scared. And we are in the I see you. So I need to, going back to do you need emotional intelligence or whatever it is, this is a moment when only a human can provide the kind of comfort that will allow the parents to make the right decisions about what to do. I think one of the most fascinating projects I ever got to work on was with the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, head of the World Cup and Olympics.

It started very interestingly, Rio suffers flooding, seasonal flooding. It basically shuts down the city. the mayor had been recently elected, and I think within the first couple of months after he started his term, he was literally stuck in his own car in the middle of Rio because there was flooding all around him, trying to manage the city from his phone. As he told me and others that story, you know, months later, he said, you know, he made it his life goal to make sure that that never happened again. and he wanted to do something that was not only, you know, transformational to the city of Rio de Janeiro, but would really send a signal to the world. There's so many aspects of that that I think were really interesting. But one part of it was just the power of convening people. And it's not just government, but it happens in large private sector organizations where, you know, over time, because of performance management and predictability, the optimization focus really tends to be in a silo or a business union. at, you know, sort of level. And city government can be the same thing, right? Public safety has

its own building, emergency response, its own space, right? Public health, et cetera, et cetera. And so when something, not even a flood, but like a, you know, major accident happens on, you know, a highway or street in Rio de Janeiro, it requires four or five, six different agencies to come together and they weren't always on the same page. So the idea was to get them out of their own buildings, break out of the silos and create a world-class operation center with a goal of shutting it down and hopefully shutting it down in a certain number of years because that way of working was no longer needed as kind of a side special thing, but it now had been internalized as a part of the mindset and the toolkit of many of the people.

And it's just a fascinating story. And they did ultimately shut it down and kind of minimize it into something. that's much less than the original vision, but you could operate in three different modes, long-term planning, emergency response, business as usual. And it was basically like, how do you instrument the entire city in a way where you're able to make real-time decisions, you know, on the fly? So I think it was a great example of the mayor having a bit of a vision, but recognizing that he had to bridge, he had to partner. And I think that was a really, strong signal ahead of these global events where the world will be watching to say, you know,

this is about getting as much value for our region and our city as it is giving back to the Olympics and to the World Cup and that whole community. So we spent three days in Rio de Janeiro running workshops with hundreds and hundreds of people with simultaneous translation. And, you know, to this day, one of the things that stuck with me, Paula, is you can imagine when those public announcements went out, right? Rio de Janeiro, Brazil hosting these incredible events. The number of tech companies, consulting organizations, and people who wanted to contact them and sell something. Well, once we had built a good enough relationship with a mayor, you know, he pulled me aside and he was like, you know, things are going good, keep collaborating. And I asked him, you know, Mayor Paya's,

why? Why did you, you know, decide to go with us? And he said, look, pretty much everybody and their mother was contacting us and saying, here are the 10 things you need to do, sign here. You are the first team that said, let's collaborate. We want to listen. We want to learn. And so I think it's just a great reminder of the basics, the fundamentals matter. What should a person do through works in an organization, whether it's public or private sector, that is just reluctant to innovate, something that is slow, stodgy, grounded in tradition,

and this is how it's always been done. From the point of view of an employee who doesn't necessarily have a whole lot of power, what can they do? We have many examples of that. So a number of the leaders we studied were CEOs are very senior. But we also made sure to study middle managers and also individual contributors. One thing to think about is you are not driving alone. You are not doing this alone.

So what we see in organizations or teams, so if you're an individual, you're asking, One of the things that I would realize is it doesn't matter, I can't do this alone. So who do I need to bring in to get this done? When you look at that list of people, you might say, okay, too tired, can't do it. It's going to be impossible. But what I find is that, and this is what entrepreneurship is about, entrepreneurs are a little bit crazy. They have to be a little bit. They're quite committed.

They do map out who do I really need to get this done. You have to be entrepreneurial about it. Okay, where should I start? Who's going to be most receptive? because what you're really trying to do is build coalitions. And one of the leaders that we studied always said, you know, often when we think about doing these kinds of things, we think to ourselves, how do I get to the most powerful person?

I'm like, you know, I take this is the person with the power. Uh-uh. He always says, go for the person who shares your interests. Everybody's trying to get to the powerful person. But there's a person out there who shares your interests who nobody wants to talk to, and you're willing to talk with them. There are two leaders that we studied. I was in Japan.

We go to Japan together. We're in Japan, and I was in Japan on a panel, and I think I was supposed to be the main guest, this particular event. But there was a man there who was an engineer, Akira, who began to talk about teleportation. Now, I'm a person who loves Star Trek and start of it. I'm thinking this person over here who I just experienced as a young man, I don't know that he really is particularly, but I'm younger than me. I'm thinking, this man is up here talking about teleportation, so I couldn't wait for the cocktail hour. Right. What are you talking about?

Anyway, we've been studying them for about eight years now. But this man was an engineer, Japanese engineer at A&A, the Japanese airline. We're talking about airlines today, but another conservative company. And Japan has seen his relatively conservative country, right, in some ways. So he had a buddy that he met when they were working on the 787, because A&A took the first 787s from Boeing. And there was a Japanese young man who, I'm calling them both young, anyway, who was working at Boeing in Seattle. This engineer was on the Japanese side, accepting the plane. They found out that they just liked things together.

They had common interest. They'd both gone to Montessori, which is actually a little unusual for Japanese children. And they talked more and realized that only 6% of people in the world ever get on an airplane, which to them was amazing. You know, for those of us who fly hard to. only 6%. So they thought, okay, how is A&A going to grow? Because what percentage will we ever have of that 6%? Finally, they come up with, well, maybe we can do teleportation. So they went to the CEO. They actually found a way to get on his calendar. He was like, what are you doing in my office? Like, who are these people? And they start talking about teleportation. But they explained him we discovered after talking to some quantum physicists that it'll be like 80 or 90 years before we can move the whole body.

But can't we teleport human consciousness in our five senses? Don't you think we need to go into mobility? I'm here to report. It's a long story, but they've gotten millions of dollars from investors to create what they call avatars. And it's a combination of AI and robotics, which is the next big thing, I understand, from they started this years ago. What you do is you're sitting where you're sitting, but you can send your five senses across the internet and be doing, you can be fishing, somewhere else. You could be diffusing a bomb. You could be a person with ALS who wants to still be productive and work in a restaurant because your consciousness can go over this, this avatar robot.

These exist, and there's one up on the International Space Station. So what they did is they figured out how to leverage themselves. They actually said, oh, you know, X Prize has these competitions every year, grand challenges. Let's see if we can find out who's actually creating a haptic hand. A haptic hand is what you're sitting here, but I can have the sensation of touching something miles and miles away. So they use XPRIZE to figure out, oh, these are the three or four companies that are best at making these haptic hands, or these are the three or four companies that are best at figuring out how to send smell across the internet. They then introduced themselves to those companies that were doing it best and said, why don't you all

cooperate instead of compete? Because then you can do the hand faster. You all can win. That was not an easy sell because startups often are competing, but then they also convinced that CEO, give us a little money to give to each of these three major players. The last thing I'd like to add to that is people really look for meaning in their work, and so many people are disengaged. I mean, the research tells us that. So create your own meaning in your work. What would really excite you if you could do this for whoever, that customer, that stakeholder? and who might also want some meaningful work that you're hanging out with, you know? What I'm hearing is that becoming more valuable at work and doing more meaningful work

are actually moving lockstep. They do, because that's what we want. We want to feel valued and we want to feel valuable. So what will help you feel valuable? And instead of saying not possible, you know, sort of set a reasonable goal for how you're going to work on that. It might take longer than you want and you might get a few gray hairs. We're trying to get it done.

But if it really will make your day more meaningful for you, you know, what I love about your show, you talk with people about where should you focus your time and attention? What better way to focus your time and attention? If you're at work for all those many hours, and make some part of it should be about something that you would find meaningful because you know it'll solve a problem for that customer. The Avatar Ed story is one of my favorites because I just, I love a good underdog. And, you know, Linda and I have worked in Japan a lot. Love the country. Love the people. But, yeah, it tends to be conservative.

And to me, it's a story that it's against all odds. And if two junior engineer kind of nobodies inside of this organization figured out a way to leverage themselves, ignore being laughed at when they raised teleportation and they wanted $10 million to, you know, for some XPRIZ that, you know, A&A's leadership team had never. heard of to create an ignited global movement. I mean, I don't know many people, maybe you do, Paula, maybe Linda at HBS, you do, who wake up every morning and say, ooh, I want to ignite a movement and launch a new ecosystem, right? And I think that there's some misconception, at least that I had in my mind for many years, which was, you know, ecosystems are formed around companies, the Nvidia

ecosystem, the Microsoft, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but no, the reality is they were started by a couple of people like Kevin and Akira who found their coalition of the willing with that shared interest. They made it bigger than any of the individuals. And they made part of their success removing themselves and walking away so that the movement could thrive and flourish on its own. And I think it's just a reminder that, you know, if you really want to, you can ignite your own movement too. That's a message of hope. And back to your question about practical advice, I'll give you two things around like how people can innovate and start innovating. I think number one is the power of questions.

It's another undervalued characteristic, I think of great leaders. A couple of my favorites that have been forged by fire. One of them is, what would you never say about blank? And it's meant to be an intentional reframe to get you to kind of think out of the box. So one of the examples that, you know, we use is what would you never say about, you know, trip to a grocery store. Well, many things, including you would never say, wow, it's an awesome place to buy a last-minute gift. The merchandise in the toy aisle is kind of crap. My nine-year-old knows that. Are you going to be the person who brings the fruit basket to the 12-year-old birthday party?

Right. So West Coast grocer named Safeway started with an experiment many years ago called Project Gift Card. That was a result of them asking that question of what would people never say, you know, with all of this foot traffic walking into our stores every day. So that pilot became obviously a core part of their business. At its peak, the gift card business for Safeway was three times the valuation of their core grocery business. You know that you're onto something when your rivals and your competitors are coming to you and saying, please, we're worried about people changing their behavior and their patterns. Can you put your gift cards on our shelves as well. So the power of a question. And that's one of my favorite ones that I think if you're a

startup with three people or you're a large company, you have biases and orthodoxies. And this is a way to start to scratch beneath the surface and start to understand what were the root causes or the decisions that were made or the assumptions that led to this thing or orthodoxy that no one has challenged. The second thing that I'll say is purpose. It's well documented. lots of people talk about it, but there's important nuance. And I think one of the discoveries that I had having been at places like Salesforce and Microsoft, places that care deeply about purpose is there's a big difference between clarity of purpose and shared purpose.

And I've been in places where there was clarity of purpose. And the chit chat around the water cooler was, wow, that's not really that exciting unless you're in finance or you're the CEO. And then I've been in places and we've studied exceptional leaders who are very thoughtful and deliberate about creating genuine shared purpose. They don't take that for granted. They don't dictate top down what the purpose is. They create the space and the constraints for people to feel like they co-created the articulation of that purpose. And it's human nature.

If you feel like you contributed and you're a part of it, are you going to be more excited and motivated to bring your best self to work every day? Of course. So those are the two things. Power of questions and make sure that it's shared purpose, not just clarity of purpose. Yeah, and the question part is I'm thinking at Procter & Gamble at a time when they were, actually they had an activist on their board because they weren't growing at the pace at the market, expected them to grow. one of the things that the C-suite realized is that when people were coming to them with ideas, you know, thoughts and data about how those ideas were being received by the end consumer, those interactions were often demotivating. The reason, in part, was because they were making more statements as opposed to asking questions. So they actually got a coach to come, the C-suite of Procter & Gamble,

well over 100-some-year-old company, over 100,000 employees. The CEO and the head of all of them, they all said, we need a coach to count. Are we asking questions or are we making statements? And then they would get the ratio each time. And needless to say, you want to be asking more questions than making statements.

Because as soon as the CEO makes a statement, you kind of know, oh, in this instance, he's a he. He likes that idea, not this one, right? As opposed to what's a series of, what did you? And the questions that came on. up with it, they needed to always ask was, what did you learn? How did you learn it? What else do you need to learn? How can we help? They literally wrote a script out. There's a professor at MIT who writes about the power of questions is really a very practical. And you can also ask questions of yourself,

you know, talk to yourself a little bit about, what about this? What about that? Or really, one of the other leaders, a man who is a cardiac surgeon, a Rhodes scholar, very smart individual. One of the things that I study is why smart people have more trouble learning to lead. This is a smart person who does not have trouble learning to lead and really works at it. But one of the things that he was aware of was in part that in some ways he could be intimidating. And he wanted to create a culture, and this was in Abu Dhabi, another relatively hierarchical culture. He wanted to create a culture where people would innovate. So he began to say things like, this particularly don't.

COVID. But he said to everybody, I'm scared, but I trust you. Imagine if your CEO told you that. This is a surgeon, you know, a road scholar. I'm scared. But then the other thing he did, going back to self-awareness, is he got what he referred to as a sparring partner, someone who thought differently than he did, who he started going to to get feedback on his impact. And his sparring partner would say, well, you know, you thought you were trying to do this, but let me tell you how it was heard. So it's very hard to get better unless you get feedback. And, you know, going back to the discussion we had about consensus, how many of us want to tell the boss, guess what? You know, you were trying to do this, but didn't work. Well, and it sounds like he

designated a role. He did. He said, I need a sparring partner, somebody who's really going to tell me how I'm being perceived, right? So I think that takes a certain amount of self-confidence. I mean, as a professor, you know, we get our teaching ratings every course and you don't even want to open them up and maybe whatever you do, you get your ice cream or your glass of wine or whatever is going to calm your nerves after you've opened them up and you have it sitting there. And then you go through it. But he created a real time. It really matters what my experience is that I'm creating for people. And the smaller your company, startups and fewer people, the more you have an impact on how you have an impact on how. the people feel about work. And you, I always like to tell people when you get to be the leader,

you have rights and privileges, but fundamentally you have duties and obligations. It matters that you get this right because these people have joined your company or joined or working with you in your small business. And if this business is not successful, then maybe their children won't get to go to that private school they wanted to send them to or that vacation they wanted to take. So I always like to remind people. And when you're innovating, you are taking risks and some of them are going to fail. They're going to be missteps. So you need to work on yourself and be the best you can be. And this person, he was in Abu Dhabi, so this is the Cleveland Clinic of Abu Dhabi. Initially, when the Cleveland Clinic tried to open a location in Abu Dhabi, the first iteration

failed because they were going into an existing structure. Well, it failed for a few reasons. But one is not so much, I mean, part of it they were going into an existing structure. I mean, it's sometimes easier to build things from scratch. I think that they had learning to do. So one of the things that every U.S. hospital that tried to go into the region failed. Actually, and the UAE, a number of them did to include one that I was on the board of. So I think that part of it was they needed to build a robust partnership with someone who really knew the region and knew what was going on in that area. Because too often, and I want to be very careful about this because it's hard.

whenever you try to go into a new area like that, is too often we have a cut and paste kind of orientation. You know, Cleveland Clinic is one of the best hospitals in the world in Cleveland. So we just take what we have and we kind of put it in another context. Well, guess what it doesn't work? And so what you need to do is partner and develop that contextual intelligence about what really matters. So a very trivial example, they wanted to do scheduling. It's a very smart hospital. But, you know, unlike Christmas, Ramadan moves. Right. So the models you come up with about how to do, how to staff have to be adjusted every year. It's not going to, you know, you can't. So these are, these are sort of the sort of silly mistakes or missteps, if you

well. But one of the things you see when you read about how they did things is he wanted them to all be learners and to all be collaborative. So one of the things they did is there's the crash cart that we all see in the television shows where somebody has a heart attack, you grab it, right? Instead of just taking the crash cart that they use, in Cleveland Clinic and just setting it up that way, they actually asked, it turns out, they're set up different ways in different countries. Now, they have to standardize it because you can't be looking for where the things are, right? But they actually started from scratch and said, let's learn from each other. Why do you put it there? Why do you put it here? As opposed to, we're the powerful

ones. We're the bosses. We're from the U.S. We're the top hospital. They asked all of them, well, why do you do it that way in Egypt? Oh, okay. And then they designed a better crash cart. So when they begin to work on issues, you can't do it, and people begin to innovate and say, ah, because you're rubbing ideas against each other. This is another way, a better way to do it. This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group. Beauty is a powerful force that moves us. That's why L'Oreal Group has built a business that is inclusive at its heart with 100% of its brands,

championing diversity. With 25,000 professional opportunities for people under 30 worldwide, and 54% of leading positions held by women. Diversity is a strength that helps L'Oreal group create the best beauty products for all people. Visit Loreal.com to learn more. Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people?

Scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social? Let me introduce you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip, they stay for hours. They don't move on.

They manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. There are a lot of passionate people with different viewpoints who are all contributing to the conversation. But somebody ultimately has to have that decision-making authority. And from that point forward, you can't constantly be relitigating it.

It's got to be decided. done, we're moving on. How do you know when the appropriate time for that is? One of the aspects that I love about Cleveland Clinic is directly to this point is Rakesh in the middle of COVID and him saying, hey, I'm scared and being very transparent about his emotions and level of confidence, but does something where he says every decision is a working hypothesis. I've been someone over the years who I've heard, you know, hey, be curious. life is a lifelong journey of learning and are we learning as an organization? And I was found like, yeah, that's motherhood and apple pie, but how are organizations like actually

institutionalizing that and making it a part of their culture? And that was the part that especially Cleveland Clinic, Rekesh just really being like a world-class creator of a learning community, which, you know, it makes sense. I mean, you're talking about people who are triaging. solving health things, right? It's another way of saying, I've always felt that a gap for many organizations, five people, 500,000 is, as a leadership team, have two or three questions, questions that by the end of the year, by the end of six months, you know, you get more data and you may not have the perfect

answer to it, but you get smarter about those questions and asking the right questions, and it'll probably will lead you to even better questions. And it's so simple. That was the part that I loved about Rakesh is that, yes, he recognized that they were not going through a normal period. And to say that it's final, final, I think would be unnerving to people because they were moving so fast. And they literally were trying to figure things out in the middle of COVID. So back to the emotional intelligence, I think, of recognizing that, you know, If everything was a final decision, then it might create paralysis and nervousness and anxiety

and people about, okay, are we making the right decision? So I think it was powerful for him to create the right environment of psychological safety by saying, yes, it's a decision in the moment, but in the big picture, it's a working hypothesis. We wrote an article about how decision making is broken in many organizations because there is not clarity about who's going to make the decision and or there's clarity, but people don't think it's fair. So the other part of it, either one of those, so if you have to, while you're doing the decision, the other thing is what are the criteria we're going to be using to make certain decisions? At MasterCard, they used something that's a fairly common set of criteria used when you're doing

trying to decide about innovation. They said, is it desirable, i.e. does the customer, will this meet a customer need? Two, is it feasible? Do we have the technology that will allow us to actually do that? And three, is it actually something that's consistent with a broader strategy? So they all agreed, and they had lots of debate, lots of conversation about what the criteria should be. So once you decide on those criteria, the other thing you can argue about what's the evidence that you've met that criteria, right? So they talked about all of that.

So you often want to do those things separately from the actual decision-making circumstance you're in when you're in the middle of it. They'd spend a lot of time thinking about that. And they did that also at Cleveland Clinic setting priorities. These are the priorities, and this is the order in which we're going to make decisions. So, again, not only were we clear about who had decision-making rights, but we also knew that as we're making those decisions, this is first, this is second, this, you know, so they had agreed on those things. And that required some decision. They did that in advance, if you will. So then when you're in the decision, you can remind people.

So one of the other leaders that we were working with whose group had trouble dealing with conflict, they had started in that organization, they had something. called straight talk because people didn't do straight talk because they were too nice. The idea that you needed to speak up and say the pros and cons, people, can we think of other ways of saying this? What they had was they had a straight talk coin. And if you felt that no one was really speaking truth, you could put that coin on the table and what it meant was, are we doing what's best for the customer? That was to bring everybody's attention back to, okay, are we really saying what we need to say to meet the needs of this customer. So you didn't, you know, you were careful about when you put the straight talk going down. But if someone actually bothered to do it, and you put it down and

meant, oh, yeah, we're not talking about what really matters here. We're talking around the circle. But the other thing I learned at Pixar, we talk about something called how do you do decisions. You do decisions in a both and way as opposed to an either or way. So to make sure you do that, you can't let one group dominate. So they wouldn't let the bosses dominate and they wouldn't let the experts dominate. Because either group dominating, usually you get either or, as opposed to both and. Most innovations are combinations of ideas. So Jason had a part that was good. Linda had a part that was good. Can't we combine those in some ways? And the other thing that is a big problem, I will say, is we don't often explain to people why we made the decisions we made. Even if we're

an expert or we're the boss, we make the decision, but we're not willing to go back and say, by the way, I made this decision because of these three criteria. You know, what I've found in my company is when I've gone back and tried to explain why I've made a decision, my team has interpreted that as this is still up for discussion. This is still negotiable. This is not fixed yet. And so every time I've tried to explain a decision, that has been taken as a sign of weakness that that decision can be overridden. I think what you need to tell them is this is the decision and let me tell you why this is the decision.

Maybe it's something about the way you're putting it. I mean, we all want to tussle. People who work with us or not our parents or our children, but I could always tell when my parents meant this is done, right? Yeah. Again, it's not, you're not dealing with, but they're just telling me, let me tell you, this is dangerous for you, Linda, or this is why I don't think you should do this.

You're being confident to say, this is where we are, this is what I'm going to do. I'm not sure about what your style is when you're doing that. And if you've changed your mind lots of times, then they've learned that it's worth pushing you a little bit more, right? Yeah. I think I over-explan. Like, over-explaining can often be seen as weakness.

Or that you're not feeling so confident about it yourself. You just need to maybe tell people, this is how I've weighed the choices. And we need to make a call because we need to move. Certain things are urgent or they're now urgent. We need to do it. We need to decide. And there are going to be costs. And let's all pay attention to what the impact of this decision is and bring back the information as soon as we can to say,

looks like this was the right call or this one's not going in the direction any of us hoped it would go. Well, we're coming to the end of our time. Is there anything that I haven't asked about that you'd like to emphasize? There's so much we could talk about, Paula. I think the thing that I would like to end by saying is that leadership is really hard and it is a lifelong journey. I have all the respect in the world for those of you who choose to lead and have some grace. with yourselves. And maybe I'll end with a very quick story that gives your audience a sense of the amazing world that we live in. Recently, I had the opportunity to see a demo. There's amazing things happening around the world, including India, a place that Linda and I have been many,

many times, have been to India at least 20 times. And part of what the government of India is doing is they've got this program to democratize and provide public access to a bunch of documents. And meanwhile, others like Microsoft, Google, IBM, et cetera, usual suspects are involved in other kind of like AI infrastructure parts of this. So that's the context. So what was the demo? The demo was a farmer in rural India who is illiterate, can't read or write, intelligent, but illiterate. and he's heard of a government subsidy program. And so he expresses the thought in his local dialect.

Local dialect spoken by a few thousand people in that area to a version of chat GPT. So pretty complex thought, right? Hey, I've heard of this program. Want to find out if I'm eligible. So comes back and says, good news. Looks like you're eligible. You have to go to a portal, fill out some documents, and you'll get a check in the mail in X number of weeks. This is when it gets good.

The farmer says, I don't know what a portal is, and I'm not going anywhere. Just do it for me, which was not part of the original use case of the demo. But it ended up doing it anyway. And it came back, asked a few questions, and voila, the farmer is going to have his check in a couple of months. So why am I telling this story? Well, because I was among some other people when they saw the demo, they were starting to cry. And one of them started to open up and say, you know, growing up in India, we've been talking about the Industrial Revolution arriving here for a long time for many decades, especially rural India. And wow, here it is.

And I think what's amazing is how it happened. So one guy, a developer on the west coast of the United States in California, connected with someone in India who was working on this government program. They scaffolded speech to text, text to speech, functionality to a large language model that was trained specifically on these government of India documents. And 30 days later, they changed the life of a farmer in India. That's the world that we live in now. and change is never, ever going to be as slow as it is right now. So if you're out there, you have the opportunity to truly take this amazing magical infrastructure and do things that have been impossible in the history of the world.

That's beautiful. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? Yeah, well, we've got a website for the book that we're really excited about, not only in English, but also in Spanish and Portuguese. It's genius at scale. because we're hopeful that we're going to be igniting our own leadership movement. And so we want to hear from people and trying to activate a community of people who are passionate about a different sort of innovative leadership.

And obviously, you can find us on LinkedIn and other places as well. Thank you. You can find their book at Genius at Scale. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one. Consensus is the enemy of great ideas. most of us have been in a meeting where everyone just nods in order to get along. That never produces breakthroughs.

At best, you get something mediocre, average. So the antidote is what Linda calls creative abrasion, which is actively encouraging debate and letting ideas compete against each other. Competition is how good ideas get made. Unless you can rub ideas against each other, you don't end up with a robust pipeline of ideas really worth test. Often what we'll do is we will minimize difference. We will either, you know, reach for consensus or whatever it might be, which means we never really have to decide or we won't even acknowledge it at all. Key takeaway number two. Stop trying to convince the most powerful person in the room. A lot of people go straight to whoever has the most power. That almost never works. Instead, find the person who cares about the same problem that you do. Even if that person is a quote,

unquote nobody, even if no one else is paying attention to them. Find someone who shares your same interests, who cares about the same problems, and start there. Build your coalition from the edges, not from the top. Go for the person who shares your interests. Who shares your interests in that problem or that opportunity? Start with them. Everybody's trying to get to the powerful person. But there's a person out there who shares your interest who nobody wants to talk to, and you're willing to talk with them. Then you all figure out who's the next person. Finally, key takeaway number three. Find an idea that's wild.

You heard the story about how two junior engineers at a Japanese airline pitched teleportation to their CEO and got millions in funding. That sounds like Madlibs. It sounds made up, but it's not. These are mid-level engineers at Japan's largest airline who started having dinner conversations about why only 6% of the world ever gets on a plane. And that led them to pitching teleportation. that led them to talking about quantum physics, they met with their CEO to pitch him on building avatar robots that could send your five senses across the internet

and raised millions of dollars. So your idea can be this wild. They started with a customer problem. They started with a problem of how do we get more people to travel? And they got super creative. They found other people who shared their obsession and who weren't afraid of thinking big. And then they built from there.

They start talking about teleportation, but they explained him we discovered after talking to some quantum physicists that it'll be like 80 or 90 years before we can move the whole body. But can't we teleport human consciousness in our five senses? Don't you think we need to go into mobility? I'm here to report. It's a long story. But they've gotten millions of dollars from investors to create what they call avatars. And it's a combination of AI and robotics, which is the next big thing.

The story about selling gift cards at Safeway, same idea. What would you never say about going to a grocery store? You would never say it was a great place to pick up a last-minute gift. All right, well, how do we fix that? Well, you know, it would take a lot of space to be able to carry gifts. It would take a, you know, how do we fix it in a way that doesn't take up too much space? Ding, ding, ding, ding, gift cards. Whoever thought to sell gift cards at grocery stores, but it turns out to be a big moneymaker for Safeway.

That's what wild ideas can do. don't be afraid to be wild, be weird, and find people who are also willing to push the edges. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, open your favorite podcast playing app. Hit the follow button, and while you're there, please leave us a review. These are incredibly helpful in allowing us to find and book amazing guests.

Number two, download our fire playbook, afford anything.com slash F-I-I-R-E. It is a playbook on how to build a life of financial freedom. It's a fill-outable workbook that helps you strengthen those five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. No jargon, no generic advice, just practical exercises to help you figure out what to do next. It's totally free. Affordanithing.com slash F-Double I-R-E. That's number two and number three. Share this with the people in your life.

It's a single most important way that you spread the message. Spread the hope, spread the joy, spread the double-eye fire. Thank you so much for being part of this community. I'm Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.