Founder's Story - Most Sought After Professor at Harvard Business School | Ep. 26 with Professor Frances Frei

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Frances Frei is a Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how leaders create the conditions for organizations and individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations,... --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ibhshow/supportOur Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Inspired by Her, the podcast that will give you the inspiration, motivation and tips for success from some of the top executives, CEOs and influencers from around the globe. With your host, serial entrepreneur and named one of the most influential Filipina in the world, Kate Hancock. And we are live. Hi, everyone. This is Kate Hancock. And today, I have Frances Fry. Hi, Frances Fry. Hi, Kate Hancock. It's really so much fun to be here. I know. Frances Fry, everyone, is a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School. Now, she's a global thought leader on leadership and strategy. In 2017, Frances was tapped to be Uber's first senior vice president of leadership and strategy with a mandate to help the company navigate this very public crisis in leadership and culture. Now in May 2018, Frances delivered a widely viewed TED Talk on how to build and rebuild trust. Frances is the

best-selling author of Uncommon Service, and she and her co-author, Anne Morris, is launching a new book, Unleash. Yay! The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. I'm so excited for you to be here. All righty. Yes. Now, Frances Fry, before we can talk about the book Unleashed, can you tell me what was your journey like to get where you are? Oh, golly.

How far back do you want me to go? You can do whatever you want. Okay. Youngest of six kids growing up. My mom was 25. So that had a lot of grew up in a working class environment didn't want for anything didn't have anything extra didn't get on a plane or go to a hotel until I played college basketball and then I would travel with the team um so that's when I

first began to see the world and then ended up getting my PhD at Wharton uh tried to get to Harvard five times they said no to me five times uh finally got there in the summer of 1998 and uh so that's been over 20 years I guess if I took two years off, which I did to go to Uber, it's been just 20 years. I studied math and computers and then industrial engineering and then operations and information management. All that means is that I went from theoretical to applied. When I was at HBS and I was and information management. All that means is that I went from theoretical to applied. When I was at HBS and I was studying operations management and the role of technology in operations management,

I was like just sure. I love making things work. I was sure I could make things work if we could just take care of the pesky people. Like it was the pesky people that were getting in the way of everything. And then I became obsessed with the people. And that whether or not they were led mattered. And so then, so I still have deep operational roots and deep technical devotion, but it's the people that now, and the leadership of people that now I see as the great unlock

that we can do in the world. Wow. Now, what was the motivation to write this book and leave you in? So we went, I went to Uber, but it was a family decision in June of 2017 when Uber was not doing well. It looked like the company could go either way. We were able to turn around the culture and put in a massive influx of executive education and really helped turn the company around in nine months.

So I was going to go back to HBS, and then I thought, you know what? I saw a persistent problem that if we didn't address, I worried I would go back to HBS and just be an additional person complaining about it. And that persistent problem I saw at Uber and at every organization in Silicon Valley, and then increasingly elsewhere were that women and people of color were hitting a glass ceiling, if that's still a word,

but that awesome women and people of color, job opening comes up, and they wouldn't get the job. In fact, they wouldn't even be considered for the job, because they were missing one of the five criteria. And so, but I'd see other people missing one of the five criteria, and they'd get the job. And so it just, so I thought, well, I can go and try to fix society. Or I can go and find a super efficient way to give the women and people of color the fifth criteria. Wow. So that's what we aim to do. We started a company that's aimed at, it's a leadership accelerator for women and people of color, just devoted ourselves to understanding what is getting in the way.

The company is wildly successful at doing it. And then we wrote the book so that nobody has to wonder, like the book is written with a lot of secret with a lot of top 10 lists. It's what we call a lot of secret memos, but it tells you, I know you've read it, but it tells you how to do it. So it gives the problem and then tells you how to overcome it because we don't want our voice to grow up in a world where gender or race is an interesting descriptor of how far you'll go in your career. Absolutely. Now, why doesn't traditional leadership work anymore? The short answer is because we just made leaders too self-destructive. Like collectively, not on purpose, but it's look in the mirror, build up your strengths.

It was just you, you, you. So a leader has no chance but to only be thinking about themselves. Well, if you're only thinking about yourself and I get to think about everyone else, I'm going to outperform you by a long margin. So we kind of seduced you into only thinking about you and to be leaderly and to confront yourly and to, you know, confront your weaknesses and be vulnerable and all of these things, very few of which I agree with. But instead, I get to obsess on setting other people up for success

and looking at their weaknesses and helping to develop them. There's no comparison. You're working on one person. I'm working on everyone else. And so that's the big difference. Yeah. So what is the definition of a venue leadership? Yeah. So leadership is about making other people better. It's about making other people better first as a result of our presence, but in a way that lasts into our absence. And those two parts are important. My job is to make you better. It's not about me. And it's okay if you're reliant on me in the beginning. But you're going to be making hundreds of decisions in my absence, whether I go home for the night, for the weekend, I've left the job. You're going to be making hundreds of decisions in my absence. I want your decisions to be as if I was there. Like I want you to benefit from me. So I have to systematically

set you up for my absence. So if somebody did well while I was there and I leave and they do badly, a myth is that I was a good leader. In our view, nope. If they were doing well while you were there and they continue to do well after you leave, you are a great leader. But this is ego nourishing, right? It's ego nourishing. They do well, they don't. And people are like, oh, we miss you. I don't miss you because I don't think you were a very good leader. I want to get someone who can set people up for success after they leave. Wow. Now you mentioned in your book that as a leader, you should not be a movie director, but be a conductor of an orchestra. Can you explain what you meant by this?

Yeah. So one of the, I think it's our first top 10 on this list in the book, and we really had a lot of fun with the top 10 lists. But our first one is 10 ways to, you know, 10 things that it might be all about you. And one of it is that you're the star of your own show. So if everything that's going on, if you think you're the protagonist, and so like when you walk in the room, do you want to feel all lights on you? Are you happiest when everyone else is looking at you? That's being the star of the show.

That's not a great leader. Instead, you want to be the conductor of other people being the star of their shows. Like they are the people that you want to have thrive. And so your job is simply putting all of that together, but they're the stars, not you. Yeah. Love that. Now you mentioned in your book that in 2017, Gallup took a survey of the American workplace, discovering that about 70% employees are not engaged with their work. Why is that? And what can we do to be more engaged? Yeah. So I think it's because I come into work, I do stuff. It doesn't really feel like you care. You might come in two days later and tell me what I was working on is going to change

with no telling me that. So I think that there's no nobility, like no noble purpose, and there's no honor of the employees. Like what I'm working on, I want you to see me for my contribution and who I am. I want to feel your devotion to my success. So without honor and nobility, we're just like showing up and we know things might change and they might not. So we kind of insulate ourselves. And I guess according to Gallup, we ins just like showing up and we know things might change and they might not. So

we kind of insulate ourselves. And I guess according to Gallup, we insulate ourselves quite a lot. Yeah, wow. Now, what are the rings of empowerment leadership? Yeah, so this is super fun. So leadership is not about me. So I have to set you up in the presence to the absence. Here's the thing. If you're going to do anything about setting other people up, you must build a foundation of trust. Without trust, nothing else matters. So the center of the ring is trust. You have to build trust. And each one of us can build more trust tomorrow than we do today. If you don't trust me, it's my fault, not yours. And there are things I can do. And we show exactly what to do. That's trust.

Once we've established trust, my job as a leader is to set you, Kate, up for success. And each individual on my team, my job is to set them up for success. We know how to do that. If I set high standards for you, you're more likely to thrive. If you receive my deep devotion to your success, you're more likely to thrive. The you receive my deep devotion to your success, you're more likely to thrive. The trick, do both at the same time. Most of us are doing one or the other. Great leadership, what we call love, is doing both at the same time. So foundation of trust, set one person up for success. Now I have a team and I want to learn how to set more people, not just one at a time, and more varied people. That's where all the competitive advantage comes from.

How can I set more and more varied people up for success? And we do that through belonging. A very powerful tool there is the inclusion dial, where if I am inclusive of the difference that's represented on my team, I'm going to thump everyone else that just has people that look like them. So those are the three rings in our presence. Then there's two rings in our absence. And the two rings in our absence are, I do discretionary behavior as a result of being at,

I'm a professor at Harvard Business School. But so many of my decisions I'm making are on my own. The dean, the president at Harvard, they got two chances of me acting in the way they want to. How clearly articulated the strategy is in my mind and how strong the culture is. Strategy and culture influence my discretionary behavior. Those are any leaders. If you want me to behave as you want in your absence, make sure your strategy and culture are embedded into my soul and they will guide my behavior. That's it. Wow.

Now, how can leaders remain authentic in this digital age? Oh, yeah. Isn't that fun? Because and on the one hand, I'm a terrible messenger because I just got onto LinkedIn in January, and I stay far away from everything else. But it's because I don't believe in anonymous comments because I believe in leadership, and leadership doesn't happen in the shadows. It happens with light on.

And LinkedIn is a pretty sunny place. It happens with the lights on. But here's what happens. First, if I'm not authentic, you're not going to trust me. So I must maintain my authenticity or I'm going to have a very unsatisfying career. So I want to first put that out. So now how can I maintain my authenticity? Well, one is look at my background. This isn't this, this is, I'm in my wife's office, but this is like, and we got pictures of our kid. Like I am showing up, you're showing up. Is that candle burning in your background? I mean, come on. I bet you don't have a candle burning when you're at work. Like,

like I think that digitally, at least during COVID, we have a chance of really showing up. But here's the other thing. If I show up as someone who I'm not, like, let's say I pretend I'm supposed to be, you know, I don't know, rational man. I'm just making up a superhero. And I try to be that person digitally. You're not going to believe it, which means you're not going to include me. You're not going to trust me. You're not going to give me stretch assignments. I'm, you're going to be super sad with demographic tendencies of the senior team because too many of us were inauthentic, but digitally because of Instagram and light where that has somehow gotten a

hold that perfection is better than reality. I look forward to that changing. I believe it will. But so I, so the, the, the, the, the, the myth of perfection and perfection is bad everywhere. That the imperfection, you don't learn, you just do. And if I learn at a faster rate than you, I'll be better than you. Ultimately, it's just a matter of when, and it doesn't seem to be a lot of learning on instagram there's just perfection so if we can show a little bit more rawness people can help us if we ask for help people can help us and so i think that um having to be explicit about asking for help and lowering the

dial on i need to be perfect because it's such a false myth. None of us are, but then we're just making it up. Then we can do it. But it's hard because you see this frame here and you think, how can I look great on this frame? That's another top 10 list in the book. Yeah. Now, Professor, how did you fix Uber's culture? Oh, isn't that fun? So we got there. It was broken in what I now would say traditional ways. And there's three traditional

ways that it was broken. One, the people got hired as individual contributors. The company was growing so fast in ways that I think most people can't get their heads around. I'm hired as an individual contributor and super soon after, I'm managing people. And not long after that, I'm managing managers. Nobody ever taught me how to manage and this is my first job. There are 3,000 managers. Is it their fault that they were doing a lousy job? I don't think so. I think that, so we put in a massive amount of education to teach people how to, and management occurs up the hierarchy.

Leadership can occur from anywhere, but we talk to them about management and leadership. Absolutely had to be done. And these, by the way, Uber still to this day are the best learners I've ever come across. No one had ever taught them and they wanted to be taught. So I think, so that's the first one is that have you put people in positions without training them? Have you not set them up for success? That was

the case at Uber. And it wasn't like people wanted to do something bad. It was hyper growth. That's what happens. So that was the first thing. The second thing is Uber was a magnificently cultural driven organization. And I don't know if you've been around these, like HBS is a cultural driven organization. Uber is, Riot Games is, you know, the ones that it's like, they just are like, they put the cult in culture and it's awesome, except things can get out of hand. So we have to put, we've got to put some reflectors on. Here's a common way that things get out of hand. So we have to put, we've got to put some reflectors on. Here's a common way that things get out of hand.

These companies, Uber was one, you'd write a Slack message to someone and you would use for punctuation of why you were doing it. Hashtag let builders build, you know, or hashtag pioneers, you know, like the cultural values were punctuation and used by everyone. The cultural values were beautiful.

We should just say that they were mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive works of art. Founder puts them in place. They started to get weaponized. And by weaponized, so there was one part of the cultural value was toe-stepping. And the idea was beautiful. If I'm junior in the organization and I have an idea and my manager says, it's a bad idea, stop talking about it. The cultural value encourages me to step on the toes of my manager and go above them, which is what you want. Beautiful, right? Here's what happened. It became senior person gives a directive. This person is a pain in the neck. So they step on

their toes and go down the organization. So the toe stepping was going down, not up or default to trust. Another very common cultural value in these kinds of organizations. Beautiful. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt. In practice, I'm busy. You're questioning what I'm doing. And I'm just like, oh, for goodness sake, default to trust. That's not what it was intended for.

So the culture was broken as evidenced by there were cultural values that were being weaponized. Here's a big learning for these values that were being weaponized here's a big learning for these once they're weaponized you gotta let them go there is no reeling them back in although founders really want to read them like they're like no no no that's not what i intended too late pop culture and the organism and the organism has taken them so then you have to redo the cultural values but don't you redo them, let the company redo them. So we redid the cultural values from the bottom up. It always keeps like 60%, but then you get 40% even more awesome for the current moment. Wow. So it was,

oh, go ahead. Sorry. No, go ahead. Okay. So it was the cultural values. It was the education. And then it was also teamwork. So the organization was really built into silos and all of it came up to Travis. So he'd have four people working on things. They didn't know what each other was working on, but he knew what they were all doing. He didn't want to distract them. Maybe that's a good idea at some point, but not now because I might be able to help you. You and I tragically might be working on the same thing. Like we had to teach people how to effectively work in teams. And so that was the other part of it. And doing that again,

it took nine months and you can't, it's impossible to imagine any of the things that were written about in the Susan Fowler blog, which is like one of the most tragic documents I've ever read. Impossible to imagine anything happening like that nine months in and since then, which feels like, you know, ancient at this point. Wow. Now, Professor, is that the longest ever you fix a company? Is that nine months? Nothing takes more than nine months. I mean, we say that HBS took a year, but summers are off. So I think meaningful change shouldn't take more than nine months. I'm not just being grandiose. Here's why. You can only change something if it's your top

priority. Let's say you had a five-year change plan, which, by the way, please don't. But let's say you had a five-year change plan, and you're going to say, this is what we're going to solve in five years. The only time you're really making progress is when it's your top priority. It's going to go from top priority to lower to top to lower to top to lower. My advice, all the time it was top, condense it. Meaningful change happens when it's condensed to being a top priority. I've never seen anything take more than nine months. Nothing. I've also never heard anyone at the end of change say, golly, I had gone slower.

Or, geez, we should have done less. Never, ever, ever. So do it now. Do it faster. Do more. Now I remember in 2018, I was at the Harvard business school with you and you said you're very picky of who, you know, the company that you work with. I could imagine with this pandemic, is there a lot of company reaching out to you right now there are some yes and i'm very picky as i always have

been as i should be because i like i'm on behalf i'm doing also on behalf of harvard and i want good people to win so i i have to it would be terrible if I helped bad people get richer. It'd be terrible. Now, Professor, let's talk about diversity and inclusion. A lot of company hires diverse individuals to say that they embrace diversity, but they don't really understand the true meaning of diversity and inclusion. Now, what advice would you give them, or what are the simple steps that we can do to be inclusive? Yeah, so, and what you're saying is, and I see this tragically, like, oh, we had one African American, and they leave, so let's go get another African American. It's like the African American seat, and we're not inclusive of it. We're a treadmill for it, right? And that's like tragic. It used to be

the women's seat at the table. And now there's like the person of color and all of that is a disaster because we're not really diverse. Well, we're bringing in diversity, but it doesn't help the team and it doesn't help the individuals. Here's when you get great competitive advantage. And honestly, it's morally a better way to live, but you get great competitive advantage. And honestly, it's morally a better way to live, but you get great competitive advantage. If I am inclusive of the difference that's represented on my team. So despite any difference I represent, and over 50, woman, lesbian, right?

So three boxes. Wherever I am, I should feel welcomed despite the difference despite the difference that you represent despite the difference that george floyd represents right first we should feel safe then we should feel welcomed despite any difference and if you're not safe first don't go to welcome and you know what it's like to feel safe. We poignantly know what it's like to feel safe. We know what it's like to feel welcome. You know, like, oh, it's good to see you come here. I'm really curious what you're thinking. That's the first two levels of inclusion. Then it gets super, super interesting. Now, because of the difference you represent, I'm going to celebrate you. You have a different life

experience than I do. You have a different life experience than I do. You have a different life experience than the team. Our team will be more robust and rigorous and creative and innovative if we can get you to share your thoughts and insights and questions. So it went despite the difference you recommend, you represent, to because of the difference you represent, we're going to be better. So it's safe, welcome, celebrated, cherished. And so when we wrote the book, honestly, we didn't spend that much time on safety. It was, I mean, I used an example where first time I said no at HBS to a request that was made because they said no to me so many times. And I was so grateful to be there.

A senior Dean asked if I would go teach an executive course in a country where it was illegal to be gay. And I said, no. So I'm so surprised I would say no. And they said, why not? I said, because it's illegal to be gay there. And they said, oh, you don't have to worry. They're going to roll out the red carpet for you. There is no amount of welcome that overcomes safety. Safety first. Well, this is now most poignant with George Floyd, like most poignant. Because of the color of our skin, we are not safe. Asian Americans with COVID, you know, before George Floyd, I had friends that are Asian American that wouldn't walk alone at night. So if we're not safe, you can forget the rest of it. Safe, welcome, and then I want to get a competitive differentiation, which is

if you have a team where people are mostly like you, and I have a team where everyone is different, it really doesn't matter who you are. It really doesn't matter who I am. If I'm inclusive of my team, we're going to outperform you by orders of magnitude. Difference outperforms homogeneity if you're inclusive of the difference. And there are four steps to being inclusive of the difference. And if you get to third and one is shaky, go back to go. Wow. And I love that mosaic analogy. Yeah, it's super cool. It's super cool. Now, how can we unleash people's potential in our organization? Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing. Like, I don't know what you can achieve and you don't know what you can achieve. But if I focus my feedback to you, I have two choices. I can be

evaluative of your performance, or I can be developmental of your performance. Organizations spend way too much time evaluating and far too much time developing. If I just shifted it, and I'm just going to spend all my time making Kate better and a little bit of time evaluating her. You will improve on a skyrocket. And I can tell you there's right ways and wrong ways to do feedback. But at the higher level, if we focus on development over evaluation, people will get much closer to their potential. But organizations somehow got obsessed with evaluation and evaluation does nothing but evaluate. It doesn't make any of us better.

So we should spend as little, little, little. In fact, I'd like evaluation to be self-evident so we don't have to spend any time on it and spend all the time on helping make people better. Now you spoke in the book about how FedEx was on the verge of bankruptcy and made an amazing turnaround. How did culture play in saving the organization? Yeah, I mean, that story is amazing. So early, early days, my wedding is in a few hours and I don't have my dress. Imagine a receptionist hearing this at any company in

the world in 2020. What's the receptionist going to do? They're going to put down the phone. They're going to pick up the phone and who are they going to call? Someone in their chain of command with certainty. They're going to call someone in phone and who are they going to call? Someone in their chain of command with certainty. They're going to call someone in their chain of command. FedEx had been, their culture was so clear that everyone is a partner. It doesn't matter where you are on the hierarchy. It doesn't matter gender, color of skin. All of us are here to bleed purple.

All of us are here to make FedEx better so this is you know the lowest one of the lowest ranking people in the organization hears that hears in the customer's voice doesn't hesitate calls up and rents a Cessna plane rents a private plane, like amazing, brings the dress to her. Now at the wedding, there were some people who were small business owners, word got around of how she got her dress. And they were like, what was the name of the company? FedEx. Okay, we'll start doing business with FedEx. And the number of packages they shipped every day went from three to 30. And that allowed the trajectory of the company to get where it was today. So it was culture driven first, and it was saved by a woman. I'm pretty sure a woman of color. I heard that she was a woman of

color, but I hadn't heard her last name, but certainly a woman who the culture empowered her to do what was best for FedEx. And the culture trusted her to do what was best for FedEx. And the culture trusted her to do what was best for FedEx. And everyone says she saved the company. Wow. Wow. Now, you mentioned in your book that was about the study about, in HBS, why men were being promoted in Harvard Business School more than women. What can we change as a women?

How can we get rid of that perfection, like being perfect? Yeah, so there is this thing that we did find that men were willing to, in general, were willing to send their papers out for review when they were like 80% complete. And when you send your paper out for review, smart people in the field give you feedback and the paper gets better. Women tended to hold onto the paper until it was 99.9% complete. And that means that's like an extra 10 months to go from 80% to 99%. So the men had faith in the improvement system and the women didn't want to bother anyone.

The men ended up with more publications because you could start your next one while that one is out for review. Women were just perfecting this. So they had fewer publications, fewer top tier publications. And I observed that and I was like, wait, wait, wait. I see both of them. They're equally smart. They're both like doing great in the seminars. It makes no sense to me that men should have more publications than women. I went down there and I saw this perfectionist thing going on. So then we talked to each woman, described this and said, look, please send your paper out when it's 80%. Test it. And then they immediately started having as many publications as men. Here's the thing about all of this. There is a root cause if you have the courage to address it.

But race and gender, we sometimes feel like, you know, we'll address landing a rocket ship on the moon. That doesn't have a third rail. But sometimes race and gender is a third rail. And that's where I just want people to be unapologetic about their attempts to address race and gender and every other notion of difference. But start with race and gender. Now, how can we be a culture warrior? I tried to change my title. I want to be the culture warrior. I think that and this is where the unapologetic part comes in. So very few people, even today, even with George Floyd, even with every CEO,

acting in ways that, golly, I have never seen. Like, it is the moment to be disproportionately attentive to race. And I just saw something written out by an institution that I love. And you would have cried with all of the things that they were on. We're going to do this for the, like, we're going to stand with the employees. We're going to stand with that. We're going to do this, this, and this. But you know what was missing? We are going to attract, develop, hire, and promote more people of color. I love everything else.

Don't get me wrong. Please. Attract, develop, promote, and retain more people of color, and then I will believe you're a cultural warrior. And you know what? People aren't going to give you permission, because that one just got to the uncomfortable line, because people are going to be like, oh, they're not as're not as deserving like oh every place where i have brought in people of

color the average quality has gone up not down but there's this like myth so so that's almost too much it's like you don't need a you can be yourself for all of the other stuff i'm going to stand with the students i'm going to do this unapologetic, do the part that needs to be done that nobody's going to give you permission for. And by the way, nobody will give you credit for when you're done. That's a cultural warrior. Wow. Now, Francis Fry, we talk about love, belonging, and trust. And CEOs are, this is probably one of the hardest, like with your company, not having any income, how can we make sure we're doing that and not being sidetracked because it's stressful. Yeah. And, and so this book, you could read it as it's morally the right thing to do.

It's the way to win. So if I have a foundation of trust with you, we are, you're going to give me the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give me the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. We're going to go much faster. So, I get extra speed from trust. If I can bring out the best in you as one person through love, I get extra quality because you'll perform much better than without it. If I can make more and varied people thrive, I'm going to get even greater speed, greater innovation, greater quality. So what I would say is if you don't do the things in the book, you're going to sacrifice speed and quality, and I don't think you can afford to today.

Now, there was a mention of how the Southwest CEO was sticking to his mission no matter what. How can we as CEO not sway our mission vision to customers' request? Yeah, so it's awesome. And this is when Herb Kelleher famously refused to, a grandmother needed to change airlines because Southwest didn't go to her final destination and wanted the company to bring her bag from their airline to the other airline. And that Southwest has refused to do from day one. They still refuse to do it today. It's important to know why they refuse to do it. So Southwest, we all think of as a low-cost airline.

It's not actually the reason it exists. It's a fast turnaround airline. It can turn around its planes 30 minutes faster than everyone else, which means it needs fewer planes to have the same route schedule as everyone else. So it saves about $320 million a year out of its fast turnaround because it needs 100 fewer planes a year. That $320 million a year is the entirety of the profits in a good year. So it can't do anything to compromise fast turnaround. Well, this lovely request by this woman, and you could have so much empathy to change her bag, if they had to start interacting with other airlines, they would

lose that advantage. They would lose that $320 million. They would be unprofitable. So Southwest Airlines is the only airline. Customers love it. Passengers love it. Workers love it. Shareholders love it. It doesn't lose money because it understands what it needs to be great at and it understands what it has to be bad at. And it's equally unapologetic about both. So he wasn't, he told the woman, we are designed not to interact with other airlines so that we could do these other things. That's the lesson from there is that as a CEO, know what are you optimized to be great at and reverse engineer, what does that mean you have to say no to and have the conviction that if you start saying yes to this, you're no longer going

to be winning at that. Make sure that it is super, super clear in your mind. Southwest understood it from day one and understands it now. I don't know how many years later, 50 years later. Wow. Now, Professor Fry, what are you most grateful for? My wife, my boys. And how do you want to be remembered? I met her first. And how do you want to be remembered? Oh, I don't need to be remembered. I would like to make individuals better. I mean, leadership's about making people better as a result of your presence, less into your absence. And I don't need any of that to be attributed to me. I exist to be of service. I don't need credit. Wow. Love that. That's so inspiring. Now,

Frances Fry, where can they find the book? You know, I drove an hour to get it. They sold out. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And first of all isn't it it's silver and salmon and who would have known that that's beautiful um all right so here it's available at indie bookstores so if you go to indie bookstores that's like that's a website you can see it at all of them and then walmart uh amazon barnes and noble if you're buying bulk, Porchlight is just the greatest. They used to be called CEO Reads. It's now called Porchlight. They are the greatest bulk order place

because they'll take such loving care if you want a wrapper on it, if you want, like they'll customize it, send it to individual people. They really know how, they're great at service. The audio book is available. So if you don't have a place that delivers to you right now, I understand it's not going to be in London for another 10 days.

Audio book. Dan and I asked if we could do the audio. Then they very politely said no. We were like, why not? They were like, you're not as good as a professional. Okay. And also the Kindle and the Nook are available, and they're beautiful. I don't use them very often, but it's so fun for me to be able to search, highlight, snap a page, and send it to someone. So it's, I guess, everywhere. And if you really can't find it, I'm on LinkedIn, Frances Fry. Ping me, and if you can't find it uh we will and we'll get

one to you wow we spend two and a half hours in our camping trip listening to audible and we still we we it's like let's pause let's talk about it and we went and we know what we we talked about me and my husband dan's like oh my god this is the book that it's solid it literally yeah i don't know they have to read it i mean they have to read it and i love that taking a pause i love listening to it with someone else and taking a pause because um if we do anything wrong it's that we pack in a little too much and so you do need a breather to discuss what happened. And she's good, right? Like you didn't miss my voice on the audio. She's better than I would have been and that Anne would have been. Now, for instance, what's next? What's next to you, Anne?

Yeah. So we just started teaching a course called Leading Dif difference. And that is of course aimed at being led by people who are different than you and leading people who are different than you. And so it's, it's involved with this. We're also working with Francesca Gino who wrote the magnificent book rebel talent. Um, um, but it's, how do you broker like big differences? I mean, like big differences, like ranchers and people who want to save the wolves. You know, like big African-American community in Ku Klux Klan and who has made amazing progress there.

So it's brokering conflict. It's bridging things. It also has the ideas in this book. So leading difference captivates me. We just taught it as an MBA course and it went very well. So we're now trying it for the first virtual executive course at HBS. They're going to have it in August. They've never done anything like this before. It's going to be Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 to 1 Eastern Standard Time in August. So eight sessions.

ExecEd has always been live at HBS. So we're going to see if the world is interested in talking about leading people who are different than them and being led by people who are different than them. But I'm pretty obsessed with that now, obviously, because of the current context. Well, Professor francis thank you so much for your time and where can they find you your linkedin linkedin is the only place you can find me i have responded to every direct message i have received it's my understanding and i if you tag me a comment i will respond to that as well thank you so much I appreciate you yeah my pleasure and I'm glad we're now we're now connected and I yes I enjoy that very much thank you have a wonderful day okay you too bye we hope

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