Why you should get good at being bad | Fixable
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Hello, everyone. Welcome back to a brand new season of Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach. And I'm your co-host, Frances Fry. I'm a Harvard Business School professor and I'm Anne's wife.

Happy New Year to all of our fixtures out there. We missed you desperately and we could not be more excited to be reunited today. We have so many great episodes in the works. We can't wait to share them with you. And in the meantime, please keep sending us questions so we can keep answering them on the show. And let us know if you want to join us to solve some problems together. Really, this is our idea of a good time. We're at a point in our lives where we are not fighting it anymore. No more.

So, Frances, to kick off this season of possibility and new beginnings, we wanted to explore an idea that you and I are really passionate about, which is that we all must have the courage to be bad at some things. It sounds like it's a path to mediocrity or a path to laziness.

But the truth is we need to make sacrifice in one area in order to make progress in another. And so we want to be as intentional about that, which we're going to be great at as that which we're going to be bad at. Yeah, this is insight that got you tenure at the Harvard Business School. How important the insight that got me tenure at the Harvard Business School was to ask you to marry me. Let's be super honest. Okay.

Oh, that's a whole other episode, my dear. We'll wait till the marry up episode. But yeah, what we want to get into today is how important it is in organizations to be willing to suck at some part of the value proposition. And the basic idea is that in order to excel where it matters most, you

As you said, you have to be willing to underperform. And according to your research, not just underperform, really phone it in in some other areas. And the key is to be very intentional about those other areas as well. If you have five things that you want to make investments in, if you invest in all of them equally, that's one strategy. Another strategy is pick some that you want to overinvest in.

But then you have to underinvest in other things. It's almost an emotional obstacle that gets in the way. We have forgetfulness. Yeah, no, in our experience, this is not an intellectually difficult idea. But what's hard in execution is to really have the stomach for it. ♪

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All right, Frances, let's start this conversation with an example, because I feel like this is an idea that people really need to touch and feel to internalize. So the example that brings it to life most deeply for me is the example of the MacBook Air. I still remember when about 20 years ago, Steve Jobs strode across the stage carrying a manila envelope.

And every geek. It wasn't just the geek. We were all paying attention to this moment. Yeah, we were all paying attention. And he was carrying a manila envelope and nobody had any idea what he had in that manila envelope. None of us dared to think that he was going to slide out a computer from that manila envelope. It was just unprecedented at that time. And he presented to us the MacBook Air as thin as an envelope.

Now, to do that, to be best in class at weight, which is what his ambition was,

He had to be worst in class at physical features. So to be the lightest weight laptop on the market, he couldn't have an internal CD-ROM drive. Kids, ask your parents what that was. But am I hearing this right, Frances? So Jobs and his team of incredible designers, they imagined this machine that had never existed before. Right.

right, that was the lightest laptop ever with this beautiful design. And in order to deliver on this thing that they wanted most, right, this radically lightweight, beautiful design, they had to give up some other things. Now, the example of the CD-ROM is literally something they gave up, right? There was no CD-ROM.

But the other provocative part was that there were other things that they had to include. They had no choice but to include them like a battery. Right. That was good enough, but it wasn't great. Yes. And I think that the you just detailed two of the most important parts of strategy, which is what am I not going to do?

And what am I not going to do well? I love that because we, you know, what am I not going to do? That is like a famous definition of strategy. But what we hear a lot less about is what am I going to do but not do very well?

And I think that is the emotionally hard part of what you're describing. It's more difficult, quite honestly. It's much more difficult to do something poorly than to not do it at all. The other example that brings this to life for me is the impossible triangle. So tell us about the impossible triangle. Yeah, so in construction is where it's usually used, which is there is very famously cost, quality, speed, pick two.

I remember this from when we renovated our kitchen. Indeed. And what it essentially means is that you can't beat the competition at all three of these. And so if you're going to pick two, you have to, one of them has to give. It's bad in the service of good, it's sacrifice to make progress. So if you want to speed up the project,

at the same quality, it's going to cost more. And that's intuitive because I got to hire more people and get them to work after hours. And that shit is not free. So in the world of physical products...

This in order to be great, you have to be bad is not a very emotional conversation. Right. And it's because physics applies. Like if I make something that I can drop on my foot, I can't pretend that there aren't trade-offs. I can't pretend that I can be best in class at weight and best in class at physical features, right? That they literally physically trade off against each other. In the world of services-

The same physics applies, but we seduce ourselves into thinking that we can be great at everything. So this is more difficult to do in service business. So we often say as shorthand, people think they can defy gravity. It means they're talking about a service and they're acting as if trade-offs don't apply to them. And they do. Right. And it's our shorthand for saying you think

delusionally that you can be great at everything. Yes. And we know from the science that that is physically impossible. Yes. So the moment of truth that I think about a lot is Herb Kelleher, the iconic founder of Southwest Airlines. And he had built this company that was deeply aware of the strategic trade-offs embedded in its model.

You know, in the beginning, you didn't get an assigned seat and you didn't get a full meal. But in return, you got cheaper prices and you got more frequent flights. And there's a whole bunch of operational reasons why those two things trade off. So at one point, Herb gets this letter from a very frustrated grandmother.

And she is like a very sympathetic customer. And she's describing how she travels to see her grandkids frequently. And this is a huge part of her life. She has to transfer airlines and Southwest has a policy where they won't transfer bags.

And this was a very big decision because- This is a moment of truth. This is a poignant moment of truth. Totally, because they're in this cutthroat game with all these other airlines and all the other airlines are providing the service. All the other airlines are gonna transfer your bags. So he gets this letter and he responds very thoughtfully. It's basically like, we've built an airline that is profitable enough

And doesn't make you sad, right? We're the only ones. But in return, we're going to ask you to make some of these sacrifices. And this is why if we transferred your bag, the whole model would start to fall apart. You know, they have this strategic discipline that is like unprecedented in this industry and in many industries. The other thing I love about the story is he basically CCs the entire company. That's the breathtaking part of it. And it's like, this is what it looks like.

to absorb the emotional tax of these kinds of trade-offs, which is really the hard part in our experience. And which means it's the part that the leaders...

Should model. But what we find. Must model. I just want to underscore that. Like just dial it up. You have to, because if you start to like waver even a little bit. It gets amplified through the rest of the organization. Yeah. You know, we're going to, we're going to think, oh, oh, then this, then they're not serious about this. So I'm not going to work as hard as I'm working right now because this shit is hard. Right.

And what we find that most people, the further they are away from the front line where the trade-off is occurring...

the more likely they are to forget about why the trade-offs need to exist. And so if you find your way to call the CEO, like the CEO is a guaranteed yes, if you can finally get through the gatekeepers to get there. And that's really bad posturing. The CEO should say the same no as we want the front line to say, which isn't a mean no.

It's a contextual no. It's a strategic no. It's a strategic no. And the reason that he CC'd the rest of the company is it was an educational moment. The reason he doesn't do it is we would have to slow down the turnaround time of airplanes. And if we slow down the turnaround times of airplanes, if they calculated it even 30 minutes slower, would correspond to the entire annual profit of the airline. And I think Southwest...

had a 30-minute advantage. They could turn their planes around 30 minutes faster because of many of these choices.

That gave them essentially the entire profit of the airline. And so anything that got in that way, they can't do, but they didn't do it because they didn't care. And you got the sense that other airlines, when they say no, it's just the person you were unfortunately assigned didn't care. And if I was given a more empathetic person, I would have gotten a yes. This was an empathetic no. And that is the key on Dare to be Bad. Yeah.

Okay. So say I'm convinced I'm ready to get in touch with my inner herb and I want to do this for my own organization. Where do I, where do I start in bringing this kind of thinking into the system? I think you start with your customers. So you have some, you have an idea of what your service is, what your product is and who you're serving. So when you have those, you

You start with a customer and what is it that the customer values most? And so I often think about this when the customer is thinking of giving you a dollar, who else are they thinking of giving that dollar to?

That's your competitive set. And so when the customer is thinking of giving me a dollar, why? What's the most important thing to them? Write it down. What's the next most important thing to them? Write it down and so on. It's really important that we know the ordering of attributes. Otherwise,

we could make the wrong decision. If we're going to be great at some things and bad at others, goodness, we better be great at the things they value most. When you think about your most important customers, the markets that you really want to win in, what do people care about? And what is the order in which they care about those things? And the reason that we have people simulate the customer before going and talking to them is twofold.

One, it gets you fluent in the language. You're like, it's the pre-conversation so that you're ready to go and be able to participate in the conversation. And you have a hypothesis of what you might hear. But here's the second reason.

I want people to realize how little they can trust their instincts. Because when you simulate it... It's super humbling. Oh my God, it's so humbling because people have so much confidence. Oh, our customers care about this, this, and this. I want them to do this as a group exercise because they're going to be in a group with people who are just as confident and think very differently. Well, first of all, you're both not right. So imagine, and this is what's going on, but imagine if you had two people in the organization...

pulling the company in different directions. That's what's going on. And so by doing this first, by simulating it first, you get to surface, oh my gosh, we're not all going in the same direction. We need to go in the same direction. And then let's go get guided by the people who know the answer, which is the customer.

It's a really powerful conversation for surfacing these implicit assumptions. Not only what do customers want, but which customers are most important to us at this time? Like a lot of stuff, really important stuff comes to the surface. Okay, so let's say I get to a confident list, right?

You know, like we work through all of these things. We bring in some external data. We're confident in the list. What's my next move? So if you're going to be successful in that market, look at things at the top of the list. If it's not one, I sure hope it's two. And if it's not one or two, I sure hope it's three. Otherwise, don't be in that business. Yeah. Look at things at the top of the list. And what do you have the operational capability to be great at? Not what are you great at today? What

What do you have the potential to be great at if you gave that more attention? Yep. And then if I gave that more attention, I have to acknowledge where am I taking attention away? And please don't take attention away from something that's also at the top of the list. Right. Take attention away from something that's at the bottom of the list. Exactly. The order you're

suggesting here is start at the top. Where do I want to win? And then reverse engineer. What do I have to give up in order to get there? And all of it is guided by the customer's preferences. If you're a parent or share a fridge with someone, Instacart is about to make grocery shopping so much easier because with family carts, you can share a cart with your partner and each add the items you want. Since between the two of you, odds are you'll both remember everything you need.

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So where do my competitors come into this story? So the competitors come in. When we say, what are you going to be great at? Great is a relative term. What am I going to be better than the competition at? Well, the only way I know that is if I know who the competition is. And most of us, if we go and ask people who the competitors are, they're going to say,

Sometimes companies think their competitors are different than who the customer thinks their competitors are. And you know who's right? The customer. Right. Right. So where do companies tend to get stuck in kind of bringing this up?

more strategic use of resources to life inside the system? Well, one is being disciplined enough to really get to the nitty gritty of that ordering of attributes, most important to least important. That's the first thing. The second thing is we tend to be a generous grader to ourselves. Yeah.

And a really harsh grader to the competition. So we overestimate what we look like in the eyes of the customers and we underestimate what our competition looks like in the eyes of the customers.

Oh, it's so good. I mean, we do it just to get through the day. I mean, you're going to take that away from me too in this conversation. So particularly in highly competitive industries where it's the Coke versus Pepsi, Coke is great, Pepsi is bad, or Pepsi is great, Coke is bad. Oh my gosh, don't listen to anybody on the inside about how well you think it's going. You got to go get market research because we think we're great at everything and we think they're bad at everything.

All right, so let me ask you a question that we get all the time. How does this...

approach apply to individuals? Or does it? Yeah. So this, I think, is the most common question that we get when we do this exercise with organizations, which at some point when people finally, they struggle to get it, they want to be great. They don't want to be bad. And then at some point there's the breakthrough of, oh my gosh, in order to be great, we have to be bad. And then the light bulb goes off and they're like, wait a minute.

Does this apply to me too? We had that same arc when we started doing this work and writing about it. We were like, oh shit, this might explain everything. And it turned out it explained everything because even though we teach companies around the world, we were getting it wrong at home. Yeah, the home front is a great one. So you often talk about working moms as an example. And that's just, that's just,

I just feel this one. But you're a better messenger for this. Too close to home for me. Yeah. So when we started studying working moms and we could line up the performance of working moms that were killing it to working moms that were just one missed handoff away from a catastrophe. Mm-hmm.

I mean, you know, like just the, like you can like see, you can see this whole spectrum and like the drop-off line. You can see it in the drop-off line. You can see it so clearly. I mean, I used to joke that the tell is, are your roots done? And that's a working mom who's killing it. Yeah. There's not the exasperated. Yeah. And so what we found is that the working moms that were killing it

were actually internalizing this lesson. And they were choosing to be best in class at a few aspects at work and a few aspects at home. And they were no longer even trying to be great at being a sibling, a daughter, a sister, a friend. The PTA is a laughable acronym to these working moms. Yeah. No one at the PTA meeting has their roots done. Yeah. Yeah.

Nobody does. And everyone on the just one missed handoff away, I love their values. They thought, you know what? I'm going to use my own physical exhaustion as the only binding constraint. And at least I'm going to try to be as good as I used to be before kids at school.

daughter, sister, sibling, PTA, and all of that. And so what we're saying is you can either have the nobility of effort, and that's that exhausted set of moms, that's exhausted mediocrity, the nobility of effort, or you can have the nobility of excellence. And that is being willing to make trade-offs and you can't have both. Oh, I felt that.

We wrote a book about this. If people are interested in this idea, we wrote a book called Uncommon Service. I'm sure it's in the discount bin now. It's been a good decade. But we really get into the step-by-step on how you do this.

When we were writing that book, we were like, okay, well, we got to take this for a test drive. So we went to our young sons and we came up with an ordering of attributes. And one of the things we learned is that they did not value the time we spent volunteering at their school. At all. They did not value complicated meals, like more chicken nuggets, please. At all.

they did want us to be present when we were home. Like when we were with them, they wanted us to be 100% present. They didn't want us to be

checking email in the bathroom. Again, hypothetical, hypothetical example. Disappearing for conspicuously long bathroom breaks. And the trade-offs when we really did, we put it on a map, we call these attribute maps, we put it on a map. And one thing that really jumped out at us is if we took back time from some of these activities from like,

Like, obviously, we're still putting nutritional meals on the table, but we're maybe spending less time on the New York Times recipe list. Repetition, it's fine. It was fine for this age.

If we were taking time like that, we could spend time finishing our work at the office and not bring it home. And so we were when we were home, be be totally present. I mean, you remember in preschool, we used to go week by week. I mean, you more than me. You used to spend so many evenings at the preschool on PTA responsibilities and on governance. You were on the board first.

Yeah. And listen, these schools are run by volunteers, but often that volunteer burden is not equitably distributed. Right.

And I made the wrong choice for our family by really leaning in to that part of my obligation. And it came at the expense because it was one of a list of 20 other things I was doing of being really present and connected to our kids when we were home. And the irony is you were doing it for our kids. Oh, no, that was a story in my head for sure. Yeah. This is for you, honey. You were staying there at the preschool till midnight. Yeah.

Well, yeah, the well, yeah, things went things went a little awry on on the governance front. But yes, that is a true statement. There were some midnight board meetings. I love that we started the season this way because I also want us to be able to refer back to this conversation and.

Because what's interesting is we I think we wrote we wrote the book 10 years ago. You did the research 20 years ago. And yet this is still a tension we see in organizations everywhere.

And so this is one of the things we are going to push on this season is how do you acknowledge that gravity also applies to you as a leader, as an organization, as a parent, as a human being? Yeah. In fact, the first time we wrote about it was in that bargain bin book, Uncommon Service. The second time we wrote about it was in Unleashed.

And the third time we wrote about it was in Move Fast and Fix Things. And it's, I think, the only thing we have written about in all three books because society has not yet, we have not yet said it in a way that people have been able to fully digest. And it's so important in this semester, in this season, we're going to take a swing at trying to make sure that our fixers are

Understand that in order to be great, you have to be bad and we have to be equally unapologetic about both. And Frances, I have to tell you, we're going to be writing about it in the fourth book too. Because it is a secret memo that needs to be out there. You just dropped the name of the new book, The Secret Memos.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Your participation helps us make great episodes like this. Please keep reaching out to us in all the ways. Email, call, text us at fixable at TED.com or 234-FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253. We read, listen, experience every one of your messages. Yeah, please keep communicating.

Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris. And me, Frances Fry. This episode was produced by Rahima Nassa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Daniela Balareso, and Roxanne Heilash. And our show was mixed by Louie at StoryYard. Louie!

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Right.

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