Mary C. Murphy on the Impact of Mindset Culture on Growth EP 479
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Goes great with pretzels. And pancakes. Apples too, I bet. Try GIFT-PBC today. Coming up next on Passion Struck. When I think about people who've had different work experiences and they're able to see how in one work environment, they self-present in a particular way. Certain things are really important. The ways of behaving are very particular way. But then you go into another context and things are totally different, right? The expectations, the norms, the interactions, they're totally different. And

And so we see this, but yet we always come back to defaulting that it's the individual who needs to change. And this is really important in mindset research. For years and years, we thought of mindset as just a quality in our head. And then the solution was, well, if you have a fixed mindset, just change your mind. And that's obviously easier said than done.

But it actually ignores the mindset context, the mindset culture around us. And what our research most recently has shown is that mindset culture is

actually can trump many of the experiences that we have when it comes to the ability to use and benefit from our mindset. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for

for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now,

Let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 479 of Passion Struck. A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, to be better, and most importantly, to make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we've

place into convenient playlists that give any new listeners a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it earlier in the week, I interviewed Fideon Kelly, who's a speaker and executive coach who reveals the transformative power of intentionality, a feelings first approach to living and leadership. In this interview, you will learn how prioritizing your feelings over outcomes can help you reconnect with yourself, reclaim your power and unlock

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Today, I have a special guest who will transform the way you think about personal and organizational growth. Dr. Mary C. Murphy, a Stanford trained psychologist, CEO of the Equity Accelerator, and a distinguished protege of Carol Dweck. Mary has spent over a decade researching the power of collective mindset. In today's episode, you'll discover how to shift

from a fixed to a growth mindset, not just as an individual, but within your entire organization. Mary will share her groundbreaking insights on identifying your triggers. You'll learn how to recognize and overcome the barriers that keep you in a fixed mindset, how to challenge genius worship. You'll understand how our culture's obsession with geniuses stifles collaboration and creativity and what you can do to foster a more inclusive environment. Embracing failure. Discover why aiming to fail at

least 15% of your effort can lead to greater success and personal growth. Effective effort, find out how purposeful effort can actually promote the growth of neural brain cells, enhancing your ability to learn and adapt. We'll also explore real world examples of how leaders in various fields have successfully implemented growth mindset principles to drive remarkable results. By the end of this episode, you will be equipped

with the knowledge and the tools to cultivate an environment where everyone can thrive and reach their full potential. Whether you're leading a major corporation, a small team, or simply looking to grow personally, Dr. Mary Murphy's insights will help you create a culture of growth and success. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

This episode is brought to you by AARP. Ten years from today, Lisa Schneider will trade in her office job to become the leader of a pack of dogs. As the owner of her own dog rescue, that is. A second act made possible by the reskilling courses Lisa's taking now with AARP to help make sure her income lives as long as she does. And she can finally run with the big dogs. And the small dogs, who just think they're big dogs.

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I am absolutely thrilled today to have Dr. Mary Murphy on PassionStruck. Welcome, Mary. Thank you so much, John. I am so excited for this conversation. I am excited too. Ever since Katie Melkman and Angela Duckworth told me about the work that you've been doing, I've really wanted to get you on the podcast, especially to talk about your new book, which released this past March. And I'll just say the title of it, Cultures of Growth, How the New Science and Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations.

Well, first of all, congratulations on its launch. Thank you, John. I appreciate that. Yeah. So I have been really getting more and more involved with the work that Angela and Katie are doing, especially with their Behavior Change for Good initiative. How did you initially become aligned with that work? And is there anything that the three of you are doing together now? Absolutely. So Angela, Katie, and I

I are working on a project together. They started this Behavior Change for Good initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, and they have a team of behavior change scientists who are around the country. I think now more than 100 scientists around the country.

And they have really developed what's called mega studies, where they are looking at creating infrastructure that allows you to test many different questions around behavior change, like what messages cause people to go in to see the doctor? What messages cause people to exercise? What kind of structures and strategies might we use to help students have equitable college success?

And that last question is a question that Katie, Angela, and I are working on together. Our two organizations, my organization called the Equity Accelerator and their organization Behavior Change for Good, we are working with many different BCFG scientists to

test out several different ideas that come from the research and the literature that might be useful for schools to put into place early in students' transition to college that give them tools and strategies and psychological resources that they might be able to have great success in the transition to and through college. That's one new project that we are working on together, and I just love them. I have so much respect for them, and working with them is a dream.

Yeah, the two of them are awesome. And one of the things that I really like that they're doing is so much of research historically was done in the laboratory. And I love how more and more of it is now becoming field research, which these mega studies really are promoting.

Absolutely. And the beauty of the mega study is that what we will see in research is that one scholar or one team will actually look at one question at a time, and then they need to build the infrastructure all over again, get the new partners in place to study the second question, and then the third question. And this can take decades, right? I do. And the mega study really speeds that up. It creates a shared infrastructure, shared partners, and then you can test 10, 15,

12, 15 ideas at the same time. And you can test them against each other to see relative to each other, which ones actually help people more in their real world context. So I think that innovation of the mega study is really important for speeding along efficiency and innovation in research. So they are at the top of that field.

Well, thank you for sharing all that. I think it's important if the listeners don't know what that means to explain it in a little bit more detail so they have the context. Yeah. So Mary, you ended up going to the University of Texas. After that, you ended up going to Stanford and you are known for being mentored by Claude Steele and Carol Dweck. But what I wanted you to talk about is I understand you burst into Carol Dweck's office. Maybe I'm using too liberal a term.

You basically approached her about her work and said that you had a different approach to it. Can you share what that difference was? Because I think Carol immediately latched onto it.

Yeah, yeah. This is really what I call the mindset culture origin story. And I'm happy to share it here. I was a graduate student, as you said, at Stanford. Carol had just arrived from Columbia University to Stanford. And so her ideas and she herself was relatively new to the environment. And what happens in the PhD program there is that every graduate student every year has to give a talk about

to their faculty that really communicate what they've been working on, the new ideas they've had. And so I was actually attending one of these talks. It was a friend of mine in their fourth year. And I was sitting in the audience listening to him give his research lecture. And all of a sudden, on the right-hand side of the room, a professor doesn't even raise their hand. They simply shout out, well, it's clear the fatal flaw in all this research is, and then he goes on to describe it, X, Y, Z.

And we all look at him like, what is this outburst? What is this like odd situation? And my friend starts to try to talk with this

faculty member. But then on the left-hand side of the room, another faculty member bursts out and says, no, it's not. The problem isn't XYZ. The problem is ABC. And then the two faculty members just start fighting amongst each other to say, what is really the big problem here, the fatal flaw, and showing how smart they are and trying to one-up each other as to how quickly they could take down this idea. And as I was sitting here in horror, I was watching what it was doing to my friend.

And he couldn't engage in the questions that were being asked. He choked. He was having a real stress response, not surprisingly. But what I was struck by most in this was actually what it did to him over time. Months later, he didn't want to pick up this body of work that he'd been working on for years because that experience was so painful.

Two weeks later, I'm in a different seminar, different faculty, equally eminent faculty, but they're approaching the student talks totally differently. Now, instead of trying to fight against each other to see who's the smartest in the room and who can take down the students' ideas the quickest, the most devastating comment, now what we have is we have faculty, yes, identifying what the weaknesses are in the student projects, but also communicating and actually competing against each other to see who could

could improve the project the most. People saying things like, you should try this new measure, or you should think about this other population to do your work with. And so the students in this environment were able to actually participate in the brainstorming, able to answer the questions about their own research. And they left motivated and engaged because they had new strategies that they could apply right away tomorrow morning in their research to make it better.

And as I was thinking about these environments, I was thinking they really have different theories of motivation at the heart of them. What is this idea of this harsh, proven, performed sink or swim? You're only as good as your last great idea. And the other was really about this idea that we're going to learn and develop and improve together. And we're going to help you do that along the way to actually make the work itself better over time. And I thought

I thought this feels a lot like the fixed in the growth mindset. You either have it or you don't, or it's about learning growth and development together. And so I went down the hallway, as you said, I knocked on Carol Dweck's door. She was relatively new. So I was a little bit intrepid. I didn't have a strong relationship with her before I knocked on the door and I, and she opened the door and she knew who I was and she said, come on in. Let's let, what do you have for me today? And I said, well,

I told her about this situation and I said, Carol, I know most people have thought about mindset, the fixed and the growth mindset as a characteristic of our minds, right? What is your mindset? How does it affect you? What is my mindset? How does it affect me?

But what if mindset isn't just in our heads? What if mindset is also a cultural feature of groups, of teams, of organizations, of schools, and that you might have different mindset cultures? And how would those environments then influence people in terms of the way they interact with each other, the way they think about themselves, their behavior, their motivation, their engagement? Has anyone ever thought of mindset in this way?

And she looked at me and she blinked in her Carol way and she was quiet for a while. And then she said, no, Mayor, no one's ever thought of mindset in this way, but it makes a lot of sense to me and we should do it together. And so that started 15 years of research that she and I and our students have now been doing to look at how mindset culture shapes us and how it's created and sustained and its influence.

Man, what an amazing story. Thank you so much for sharing that. Of course. I feel like I'm Harvey and now I know the rest of the story. Yeah, that's right. So Mary, I understand you grew up in San Antonio. Yeah. How did growing up in a bicultural Hispanic working class family shape your understanding really of motivation and of mindset? I think that it has.

that it had an influence on me. I think that kind of living between two worlds, my mom's family is from Mexico and we have a very close Hispanic family. We get together for all of the birthdays and the holidays and Sunday dinners and things like this. And then my dad's family, not surprising, Irish, Mary Murphy, and also German. And so has a white background and culture. And so thinking

about how I experience those two environments and how people, when they see me, I'm not particularly dark skinned. And I think that people see me and they see my name and they think that I'm white. And so I've had the experience of people seeing me through different lenses. When I'm surrounded by my mom's family, they code me as Hispanic. When I'm surrounded by my dad's family, they code me as white.

And seeing how those environments and the people around us shape how we're perceived, how we interact with people, to me, always communicated that

There's something beyond the self, right? We all stay the same in these environments, but our environments around us can shift as we move between them and how those environments differentially affect us, how we express emotion, how we actually interact with each other, how we think about ourselves as what parts of ourselves are most important in those environments, how it affects our behavior.

And so I think those early experiences of navigating these different worlds really shaped my interest going forward in understanding how the cues and the context around us really do shape our psychological experience and our behavior and our interactions with others. And that's ultimately what I went to Stanford to study first with Claude Steele, developing this idea of this cues hypothesis, how these cues in our environments actually shape us even down to our physiology.

And then later thinking about mindset as a cultural feature, as one of these cues, a fixed and growth mindset culture is a cue that tells us what's most important and valued in these environments. And then how we, it affects how we behave, how we feel, and even our physiology there.

Thank you for that. And since we're talking about San Antonio, I have a great San Antonio story for you. And I don't think I've ever talked about this on the podcast. And it also has a University of Texas element to it. So I was working at Lowe's and at the time...

I was the vice president and I was responsible for our operations and infrastructure. And the board dictated that we had to have a second data center and they wanted it to be west of the Mississippi River to give us better redundancy from where we were in North Carolina. So we had looked at Denver, we had gone out to Phoenix and we were narrowing it down to Dallas when all of a sudden I just keep getting this weekly

formal letter that comes from the city of San Antonio's Economic Development Center saying, you need to come here and check us out. And it kept coming. So I'm about to make this decision where we were going to go to the Syria-Continue Alliance that Ross Perot developed years ahead of time when I convince everyone, let's just get on a plane and see what San Antonio has to offer. Let's check them out.

So we've Lowe's, I was fortunate enough, has a fleet of its own aircraft. So we fly into San Antonio. And as we're getting off the plane, we are met by an actual red carpet, a high school band playing as we're walking down. And in New Texas, it's really the judges who have a lot of power. So all the judges are there.

The city manager was there, the mayor, the economic development. And then at the end of it, I had known I was a Naval Academy grad and I went to, I graduated with David Robinson's brother. Oh, wow. And so at the end of this is David Robinson, Tony Parker, et cetera. So, I mean, they are going- They rolled it out. They did, they went hard. Yeah.

But the part of it that was the most amazing is I met this gentleman, Marty Wender, who is one of the most remarkable people I've ever met. And Marty was the person who single-handedly brought basically that Northwest portion of San Antonio to life. He's the one who brought in SeaWorld. Oh, yeah. And Marty, you could think of different cities and countries.

having different ideas of how they attract businesses to come in. I live here in St. Pete, for example, and when I was moving a company here, the town really had what I would say is a fixed mindset about how they were trying to lure businesses in, not really going above and beyond to make the conditions right for you to want to move here. San Antonio, on the other hand, and especially Marty Wender,

wanted to make the town a Mecca for data centers because they control their own energy grid and they knew the amount of revenue they would make off of it. So they treated us in such a unique way that they really approached it that if we can do what we can to get Lowe's in here, it's a big enough name that we can attract them these other places. So Marty,

would do all these incredible things in the background to make all the problems that we would run into disappear, whether it was how many people we need to have in the data center or how much of

an allotment of money they would give us to help offset to get us there. And they also went into it with this mindset that all we really want you to do is talk about how great it was to work with the city of San Antonio and to encourage other people to come. So they gave us a sweetheart deal. And because of us initially going there and me talking to a number of these other companies, they ended up landing Facebook, Google,

the National Security Agency, major banks, et cetera. But it was all because of this Marty Wender, who it turns out was Red McComb's best friend. And the two of them were huge supporters of UT. So there's- Absolutely. I love this example of really having a growth mindset and being open to figuring out what is it that-

the client or the potential clients here might really value, right? What's going to be important for them and to have a strategy about if we can make and meet their goals and their needs and show them how they can develop here and make the conditions such that they're given strategies, resources in order to be successful here, what that will do for others, right? Looking down the

road, how will that actually help support and build the whole city, right, over time? I love that idea. And I think that this is true, that sometimes when we think about what it takes to build a growth mindset culture, there might be some sacrifices that need to be made at the beginning, right, in order to lay the foundation, in order to have a strategy and provide the resources that are needed. But knowing that what you're doing is building up that

support, that base so that you can then grow in the direction that you're hoping to grow is a really good example. So I love that. Thank you for sharing that story. This episode is brought to you by AARP. 10 years from today, Lisa Schneider will trade in her office job to become the leader of a pack of dogs as the owner of her own dog rescue. That is a second act made possible by the reskilling courses Lisa's taking now with AARP to help make sure her income lives as long as she does.

And she can finally run with the big dogs and the small dogs who just think they're big dogs. That's why the younger you are, the more you need AARP. Learn more at aarp.org slash skills. Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world. Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career so you can apply what you learn right away. Learn how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu.

Yeah, it was just amazing how what they said they would do, they went above and beyond. So for me, it wasn't very difficult to talk about how great it was to work with them because they met all my expectations and then exceeded them. So super great part of my work history. I did want to ask you a question about Claude Steele. You mentioned the cues, but I understand that

that Claude also did a bunch of work on self and self-regulation. How did that aspect of his work impact your own studies? Yeah. So Claude has had many different contributions, I would say, to our understanding and to society. And one of the areas and theories he's most well-known for is this idea of self-affirmation. And

It all comes from this understanding that there are times and there are situations in which we might wonder the extent to which we are valued or respected or that we're seen as competent, intelligent, or smart in an environment.

And what his work has shown is that those kinds of worries actually can undermine our own experience in terms of we ruminate about these questions, we wonder, we're vigilant to other cues that tell us whether we belong or we don't belong in these environments. And it can take over where our attention starts to get divided.

So we're not able to pay attention to what we're actually trying to accomplish in the moment. If you're in class and you're starting to wonder, am I valued here? Am I respected? Do I belong? You're starting to think about those things instead of listening to the teacher and trying to understand what they're doing or working on your problem set or taking your test. If you're in the workplace and you're wondering about these things, it can interrupt what you're actually trying to do for work.

And so he came up with this intervention called self-affirmation that really helps us think about the goals that we have and then the different

I would say the way I describe it is the bigness of you, all of the different important parts of you that make you who you are and that you love about yourself. So I'm a sister, I'm a wife, I'm a mom to two dogs. I'm a friend to my best friend. I'm a godmother, right? There are many different identities and experiences I have. And what he found was that having people reflect on these different identities and who they were helped to mitigate and quiet

Some of the questions about do I belong? Am I worthy? Am I smart enough to be here? And by doing just the small exercise, he found that people were able to regulate their emotions, regulate their sense of themselves, and to be able to actually work on the thing that they had wanted to work on all along, really fulfill their goals, right?

And so this self-affirmation exercise is available online. People can find it if they're interested in it. But that understanding that there are situations in which we might need to really reflect on the many parts of ourselves and that by doing that, we could actually quiet some of the anxiety, some of the questions we have about our own belonging in these contexts. That insight was really helpful in my own work.

When I started to think about how the cues are another way to regulate our context so we can have a person-centered intervention for ourselves around quieting the mind and being able to focus, but we can also think about what are the cues around us that we could actually shift in our environments to do the same sort of thing, to actually allow us to reach our full potential and to feel valued and respected in these environments.

I love that explanation. And I'm going to have to do some more research on it because I think there's a nice intersection point between what he was doing on self-affirmations and self-discrepancy theory. How do you go from your odd self to your ideal self and what role do the self-informations play in that? That's right. Crossing that chasm. That's right.

Well, Mary, in American culture, and I think in a lot of Western culture, we like to think of ourselves as what I consider to be independent agents. And I think individuality is becoming only increased because of social media. Can you discuss how your work sheds light that this belief might be limiting our understanding of the influence that our environments can have on both our behavior and our success?

Yeah, yeah. I do think, I agree with you, John, that we have in American society this kind of view that we can go it alone. If I put my mind to it, if I try hard enough, I can accomplish anything. I can become anything. And there's a lot of reason to want to believe that. And for some of us, that is the case, that if we put all of our effort into one direction, we can reach our goals and become anyone that we want to become and do anything we want to do.

But for many of us, I would say there are real structural and contextual barriers that might actually get in our way. And by focusing so much on the self, we can miss the input of those around us, right? How really we are so deeply shaped by the people around us, how we're brought up, our environments around us.

And that influence doesn't actually just stop in childhood, right? It actually influences choices that we make that then mean that we're put in other environments that are then going to in turn shape our own experiences.

I think about this a lot when I think about people who've had different work experiences and they're able to see how in one work environment, they self-present in a particular way. Certain things are really important. The ways of behaving are very particular way, but then you go into another context and things are totally different, right? The expectations, the norms, the interactions, they're totally different.

And so we see this, but yet we always come back to defaulting that it's the individual who needs to change. And this is really important in mindset research. For years and years, we thought of mindset as just a quality in our head. And then the solution was, well, if you have a fixed mindset, just change your mind. And that's obviously easier said than done.

But it actually ignores the mindset context, the mindset culture around us. And what our research most recently has shown is that mindset culture actually can trump many of the experiences that we have when it comes to the ability to use and benefit from our mindset. So we have found that you can have the most growth-minded person having the most strongest growth mindset at the personal level. But if they're in one of these fixed-minded cultures of genius,

they're not going to be able to use or benefit from that personal growth mindset because everything around them is set up to show, to prove and perform, show how smart you are. If one person has it and one person doesn't, be sure you're one of the people who's seen as having it in that context. And so the pressures to conform to those kinds of cultural norms are things I think we

underestimate. And the consequences of underestimating them is that we then don't figure out the right level of intervention. We're trying to have individual level interventions for structural or contextual problems. And so that means that we need to actually look at these cultures, how they're created, how they're sustained, how they're maintained, and then how we can change them to better support our individual level experience and our own mindsets at the individual level.

Yeah, I think that's a great example of how your research suggests that mindset is not just an individual trait, but it's a collective one. That's right. And I wanted to dive into this whole area a bit more, especially culture of genius versus culture of growth, because in my professional career, I was in both. And it's interesting. I remember when I was pursuing my MBA,

I had this professor who had us do this exercise to look back at the Fortune 500 list from 20 years prior. And he had us examine how many companies today are still on that list. And it was shocking that there were only about 35 to 40% that were still on it. And if you would do that same thing today, I'm betting that you would have the same exact- You'd replicate that outcome. Exactly.

And it gets into, I think, this whole difference that you're talking about here of why companies become irrelevant or why they stay relevant and continue to grow. And it's interesting is I was leaving Dell

which I considered to be a culture of genius at the time. They were really struggling with a lot of the top leadership at that time couldn't let go of the past success and understand that they needed to do things differently. But along the way, I met Steve Ballmer a number of times and Steve had asked me to come to Microsoft to interview to become their CIO. And so I go out

And even the interview process was arduous. I think he had lined up for me to go through something like four different visits, close to 20 different interviews. And I'm going through and I'm seeing just this culture that's really force fed. There's a lot of intimidation going on. There's a lot of look at our past, look at what we've accomplished.

Not many people at the time were talking about what the future could hold and how the company could be different. And of course, this was at a stage in 2011 where you didn't have a ton of talent that was just flocking to Seattle to join Microsoft because most people had thought they had lost their way. And they had. But one of the final interviews...

I was in was with this gentleman who had been with Microsoft for a while at that point, but he was talking completely different from everyone else I had met. He was talking about what the future could hold, what Microsoft could accomplish if it got out of its own way and started thinking about things differently.

And that person was Satya Nadal. Now, I didn't end up taking the job. I wish in hindsight I would have known what the future was because it would have been amazing to work under him. But when he took over Microsoft and you profile this in the book, I'm telling the story because the culture was completely broken at that time. And it was a culture of

where people were ruled by fear of doing the wrong thing, fear of intimidation. I mean, Steve would come into meetings, I saw it firsthand, and he would use his towering presence to make an impression on you, sometimes screaming, sometimes just acting as a bully. And that kind of spread throughout the whole organization.

So I think it's important for people to understand just how difficult this turnaround was. But maybe you can use this culture of genius to culture of growth transformation by talking about what Satya has actually done. Because I think when we look back on history, this will probably be up there in one of the top three turnaround stories that there's ever been.

Absolutely. It's so interesting that you had that experience at Microsoft. I would love to hear even more. But the idea, just for everybody here, the culture of genius is really what I call a fixed mindset culture. It's also what I joke around that genius sounds so good. We all want to be genius and we all want to be among the geniuses, right? And so that's how I know people read the book is when we say, oh no, that culture of genius is probably not the best

piece, best out way to do things. So it really holds the fixed mindset at the heart of it, which is that it's going to focus primarily on star performers. It's going to have this idea that you either have it or you don't. Talent, intelligence, ability, it's a relatively fixed trait. So then the goal is to find people at the very top of the distribution to bring them in and to rely on them

Much like a sports team might rely on a lot of different standout players who will carry the team, right? In a culture of genius, that's the idea that there are some people who are just inherently more capable due to superior intelligence and ability. And we want to bring in and have those individuals in the organization and really create an environment that's going to be set up and support those individuals.

The converse of that along the mindset culture continuum on the other side of the continuum is this belief of the culture of growth, which holds the growth mindset at the core of its core belief. And it holds that given the right supports, everyone can develop and contribute.

And the truth is that most cultures that we have are not going to be one or the other. They're going to be a mixture and they're going to move. It's possible to move between them, especially if we don't attend to the culture. And I think that's really what was happening at Microsoft.

It had really shifted along the mindset culture continuum toward that fixed mindset. And what we see when we have really strong cultures of genius, these fixed minded cultures, is that because it's this belief that you're only as good as your last performance, it's a sink or swim, prove or perform environment.

that we see people really struggling with a lot of internal competition. It's filled with backbiting, information hoarding because information is power in these organizations, really people trying to maintain their advantage and the status quo in the environment. And by doing that, we see that people will be very risk averse. They won't want to share their very best ideas

with their leaders because they're afraid that those ideas are going to be co-opted or someone's going to take credit for them and it's going to leave them vulnerable, right? They're not going to be getting the credit that they deserve.

And so you see people becoming more risk averse, people hiding their mistakes, engaging in unethical behavior because they know that is one way. If you're making a mistake in this culture of genius, it's a sign that maybe you don't naturally have this talent or ability, right? Maybe they made a mistake in hiring you or promoting you to this role.

And so you can tell then that in that kind of environment, people are not going to be thinking of the future as you describe in your Microsoft example. People are going to be focused on the present and they might be focused on the past. They're going to be resting on their laurels, right? Thinking about how great we are and the things that we've accomplished in the past. They're going to be focused very much on the

self, on maintaining their self, their own advantage, their own reputation in these cultures of genius as the genius, because a new star is born every day. And what happens in a culture of genius is that you're constantly competing against those new individuals that might be coming in. And so again, to that

question that we had before around differential attention. Your attention is now on your status and your reputation and the competition inside the organization rather than on the work and how to improve the work and thinking about your external competitors and how you can actually learn from them and actually grow your own market share and your own products and services that you're trying to develop within the organization.

So Satya really read Carol's book, Mindset, and was inspired. His wife gave him a copy of it and he read it and he was really inspired. And he said, I think that this idea of this growth mindset could be applied at the organizational level. And if we did that, people would be focused around rather than prove it all and show how smart you are. It could be about learning it all.

And if we had an orientation like that within the company, it would get us so much further. And so he started, once he became CEO, started to really work with Kathleen Hogan, his chief people officer, to really start to embed this and make this real in their evaluation and their performance. He got rid of stack ranking, which was a holdover from Jack Welch at GE, where you line up people according to their abilities at the end of every quarter, and you

You fire the bottom, it could be 10%, it could be 20%. And then the next quarter you do it again. What does that do internally? It makes everyone else your competitors rather than your collaborators. And again, it really feeds this culture of genius ideas. One of those practices that does that. Well, Satya saw this, he said, we're not gonna do stack ranking anymore.

We're going to actually start to give points and credit for learning and growth, for actually bringing the team along for different behaviors that really show the growth mindset in action. And he applied it also to his strategic decision-making. So he went around and listened to the whole company when he became CEO and he said, okay, here are the three or four places that I think new investment might actually help us have

outsize potential contributions. We're going to make technological leaps in innovation in these areas if we're able to fund these particular challenges. But he said, I don't expect them all to pan out, right? This is the growth mindset. I'm going to give them the resources they need. I'm going to give them a timeline and we're going to work together to figure out what are the mistakes made along the way that we can learn from and improve. Not all of these bets are likely to pan out, but one of those bets was cloud computing.

And that paid off big time. And that put Microsoft back on the world stage as a leading organization. And so what I would say is that this shift from the fixed to the growth mindset culture

It was onerous. It took a lot of time there at Microsoft, but it also took it takes a lot of time anywhere you're doing it because culture is one of those things that it's not just what we believe it's what we say and do it's our norms it's our policies it's our practices.

And so this isn't for the faint of heart, this kind of culture change. It takes a lot of commitment. It takes a lot of leadership support at the top. And then it takes consistent work and effort and learning. Okay, we tried this. That didn't work. Let's try something else. It takes experimentation. And Microsoft persevered. And now Satya, I think, is enjoying his 10th anniversary as CEO this year and Microsoft's 50th anniversary. And they are in a better place than they've ever been before.

thanks to his leadership and partly this mindset culture change. I love that explanation. And I just go back to my time at Dell when we were trying to introduce our first phone. And this was right after the iPhone had come out. And we wanted to launch on Android because it was so much farther ahead than Windows was.

And Steve and Michael made this deal. We ended up going on Microsoft and it was basically dead on arrival. But when we started to talk about some to some of the product leaders within Microsoft, their vision for what that phone is.

could have been was so far different than what it actually became because the powers that be couldn't get the idea of Windows operating system, the way things had always been done. People are just going to want this because it's Microsoft.

And I just look back at that one decision and if Satya had even been in leadership 2010, 2011, we might have a completely different world today when it comes to even smartphone technology. Absolutely. Yeah. So I want to talk about another fundamental issue that is facing humanity right now, and that is

If we want to stop global warming, we are going to have to come up with a different way of producing energy. I mean, there's no way about this. And that's going to require us to make incredible systems change, which to me is going from this

genius mentality to this growth mentality if we want to make systematic change to it. And in the book, you profile some meetings that you had with the head of HR and the then CEO of Shell and Hague. And I remember before I went to Lowe's, I was a practice leader at Arthur Anderson, and we were the largest consulting firm to all of the energy companies. And I remember sitting in a room

Must have been somewhere around 2000. I'm trying to think probably around 2002, 2003. We were at Exxon Mobil. And at that point, they were talking about that we had hit the inflection point that from this point forward, oil reserves were.

we're only going to come down. And this is before they found that they could do fracking in a different way. But it was so interesting because even then, looking back a couple of decades ago, the companies knew that they were going to have to change. That's right. What do you think is getting in the way of this change? And how do you think people could apply this alternate mindset to think differently and

about how we produce energy in the future, because I think we get these companies are so tied to their profit that they're not really tied to what the alternative could be if things were done differently. Yeah, it's a great question. And I think my work with Shell shows what's possible here. I think many of these companies are legacy companies. Shell's been around for 100 years, right? More than 100 years. And

Obviously, the way that oil and gas is produced is different today than it was then. But what's very clear is that this energy transition is coming. And

We don't know exactly how fast, we don't know exactly when, but we know it's here. And what that will mean is that workers from people in the oil fields, people in the deep well platforms in the middle of the ocean, people around the world are going to have to be working differently, right? There's going to be new technologies to learn. There's going to be just completely new partnerships that are going to have to be developed. And in order to meet the energy needs of the world in a more sustainable way,

and ecologically valid way. And so I think that these companies know this is happening and they don't exactly know how to inspire that kind of change. And ultimately it's a mindset shift that needs to happen at the organizational level and then come all the way down into the way that we actually work on a day-to-day basis and

Then trickling down to the individual level and how Shell went about this was really to think about how safety is their number one priority. As with many oil and gas companies, if you have a safety accident, right, it's huge reputationally and it's really problematic.

And so safety has always been one of their main priorities. And they had this goal called Goal Zero, where they really wanted zero leaks across all pipeline functions and also no fatalities in the process of extracting or processing oil and gas. And what they did was they

they were able to get these kinds of metrics down pretty significantly across time, but they were never able to actually reach goal zero. And they tried everything. They tried all the behavioral science nudges, right? When I went into the Hague, into their office, there's

a huge screen that tells you goal zero and where they are with relation to that. Everyone gets a lanyard that describes all the safety steps that need to be happening for their particular context. And even the executives are wearing the lanyard around the safety protocols. So they had many of these signs and signals culturally that safety mattered most.

But one of the things that they hadn't really done is to think about how the mindset of people there on the ground, contractors who are not necessarily technically even Shell employees, but who are certainly important for achieving Goal Zero, how

they might be motivated to actually look more proactively and vigilantly for ways in which their processes could be improved in order to meet this safety goal. And so they'd been working a lot on psychological safety, making sure people felt comfortable that if they saw a problem or if they had a way something could be that was a mistake that was made, that they could raise their hand to their supervisor and say, hey, here is an issue that's happened or here's a mistake that's been made.

But that still hadn't actually produced this positive proactive vigilance towards ways we actually might change the way that we are doing things to learn something new, to actually make different progress when it comes to the safety goal. And so we thought, well, maybe growth mindset

culture, which is about learning. It's about developing. And we called it learner mindset there, how to actually be a learner in what we're doing and how to improve our day-to-day practices that might actually get us there. And so it started at the very top. The leaders created their own growth mindset stories. They had this value communicated through their teams and through their leadership all the way to individual workers. And then they also looked at

their policies and practices because you can't say you value something and then not have it actually show up in what matters most, the material outcomes of your day-to-day employees. And so they started to work on their policies, their practices. They looked at the hot and bright spots within their organization. Where was growth mindset culture already very strong? Where were there some pockets of fixed mindset culture? And what could they learn from the way the growth mindset culture was taking off in the organization to apply it to the more fixed-minded context?

And ultimately, they had a couple of individuals raise some ideas for innovating on their process. And in that year, two and a half, three years after we started working together, they were actually able to reach goal zero and their competitors did not. And they've been able to maintain that over time. I think that this growth mindset class

culture really orients us to new ways of working, new collaborations, learning from competitors rather than just competing with people. What is it that others are doing well that we might be able to adopt, not necessarily wholesale, but actually apply to our own way of authentically working and who we are as an organization, what our resources are. Thinking about how to prime people to, yes, be willing to make mistakes, but to

really rest the learning from those mistakes at all times so that we can communicate what that learning is across teams. So we don't make the same mistake twice. Making mistakes is going to happen in any transformation, particularly when you're taking on a challenge like climate change and retrofitting your whole process and your whole organization towards that goal is to address climate change and energy transformation.

And so by doing this kind of thing through the lens of the growth mindset, we were able to really have people think differently and to be willing at the individual level to learn new things and to approach their job differently. And that produced success up and down the organization, not just with Goal Zero, but in many other ways as well.

Mary, I feel like I could talk to you for another couple hours. I'm loving this. There were a couple different directions I was thinking of going. I've had John List on the podcast and I love that he's currently the chief economist now for Walmart, but he is unique in that he was the chief economist for both Uber and Lyft.

So that's an interesting perspective among the cultures. But I also had Amy Edmondson on the show. And I think since we're talking about safety, I wanted to talk about something that she's known for, which is psychological safety. And I wanted to do this through a little bit different lens. And that is when I think of Boeing and the issues that they've been going through, they were a company that's similar to Shell,

had a mantra where safety and perfection in Boeing were paramount and it kind of drove all their decisions. But then when they purchased McDonnell Douglas, I think it was, a lot of the leadership of McDonnell Douglas came in and it really shifted the priority to more cost savings, top line, bottom line. That's right.

And to me, what I'm hearing coming out of a lot of the whistleblowers and other people who are now starting to talk is it seemed like an environment started to happen where there wasn't psychological safety anymore. Can you relate psychological safety, maybe using this and Amy's work to growth mindset and why it's important? Well,

Well, Amy and I work together a little bit in the shell situation, in the shell project. What I will say is that psychological safety is absolutely necessary. It is the base. It is so important that if you don't have psychological safety, so for listeners, psychological safety is the feeling that you can raise concerns, raise mistakes that you feel

feel comfortable enough in your environment that when you see something is going wrong, you can actually raise that up and describe it to your direct supervisor who then will do something about it, right? Actually respond in such a way that will make it more safe for you and for others in the context. And so the idea is really important, that psychological safety, that ability to feel as though you can communicate some of these ideas.

And that psychological safety is necessary, especially when there are these kinds of mergers and acquisitions, I would say, when we're actually going to change the way that we've been doing things, when we're actually going to take on new values. If there's no psychological safety, nobody actually raises their hands and say, hey, wait a minute, the way that we were doing things had a particular purpose.

purpose, and now we've changed the way we're doing things with regard to checklists or safety, and we're taking some of these shortcuts, and this could have this consequence. If there's no psychological safety because the leaders are new or there's a new kind of value in the organization, then those things get suppressed, right?

And what we have seen is that, as I said, psychological safety is the base. But what growth mindset adds onto psychological safety is not just the feeling of feeling safe when you bring up an issue or a problem or a mistake, but actually to be proactively vigilant for ways to improve what we are doing in the environment.

So growth mindset at the core is about learning. It's about developing. It's about contributing. And so when we take that learner mindset, that growth mindset to our own situation, the growth mindset layers on this ability to look at the ways that we operate through new lenses, through the lens of learning.

And when we look things through the lens of learning, we are likely to see different ways of doing things. And then you need the psychological safety to be able to speak up and say, hey, I noticed that we have been doing this checklist in this particular way for some time, but I had the idea that if we added this additional step, we actually wouldn't run into the problem that we tend to run into when we do this on a regular basis, right? So that growth mindset

tunes people to ways to improve the environment and psychological safety is necessary to be able to feel like you can raise those intuitions, raise those observations, particularly when things have gone wrong. Mary, thank you so much for that. And for the audience, what we've been discussing is Mary's great book, Cultures of Growth, How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations. And to me, looking back at my time as a senior executive,

I knew I was always reading a number of books at a time, but for those who are listening to this, whether you're an individual contributor, a leader, potentially a CEO of an organization, this is one of those books where you want to put everything else to the side and just take the time

to read and listen to what Mary shares here, because it can really transform the culture, whether it's of your team or of an organization. Yes. Yes. Thank you so much, John. And I think people can learn so much from your varied experiences and the leadership that you've done. And I think you do such a great job sharing that with listeners here. I love your podcast. Thank you for having me on it.

Mary, it was really my honor. And what is the best way for a listener to learn more about you and your work? They can go to marycmurphy.com. That's the book's website, but it also has all of our research there. And it also has some assessments. If people are interested in their own mindset triggers, or if they're interested in doing a cues audit of their own environments, their families, their workplaces, their communities,

you know, clubs they're a part of to look at where it lies on the mindset culture continuum, they can use those kinds of assessments there. Well, thank you so much again for coming here. What an honor.

Thank you, John. I really appreciate this. You take care. What an incredible interview that was with Dr. Mary Murphy. And I wanted to thank Katie Milkman, Simon & Schuster, and Mary for the honor and privilege of joining us here today on Passion Struck. Links to all things Mary will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Videos are on YouTube at both

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I'm at John R. Miles on all the social platforms where I post daily. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Are you curious to find out where you stand on the path to becoming Passion Struck? Then dive into our engaging Passion Struck quiz, crafted to reflect the core principles from my latest book, Passion Struck. This quiz offers you a dynamic way to gauge where you stand on the path to becoming Passion Struck. It'll only take you 10 minutes to complete and consist of 20 questions. Just head over to passionstruck.com.

You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview that I did with Gary Vaynerchuk, aka Gary Vee, a serial entrepreneur, chairman of VaynerX, and CEO of VeeFriends. Gary is a visionary at the intersection of business and culture, renowned for his ability to foresee trends and to shape the future. In this episode, we dive deep into Gary's latest venture, VeeFriends, which is a dynamic entertainment company bringing life to over 250 unique characters aimed at

at teaching emotional intelligence as well as personal growth. Plus, don't miss the inside scoop on his new debut children's book, Meet Me in the Middle, an innovative two-in-one flipbook featuring the beloved characters Patient Pig and Eager Eagle. I don't like generalizing, but...

Yes, I do think we need to talk to kids about emotions, but I actually think the place we need to go with them is to make them more accountable, is to let them lose a little bit more. I think we've over coddled a generation of individuals. And I think that the emotional intelligence we need to talk to kids about, believe it or not, is less about kindness and compassion. And it's more about tenacity, accountability.

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