Speaker 1: Pushkin. Did you miss me? Did you want to hear
Speaker 1: my voice? Hello? Hello, fellow revisionist historians. This is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: Season three is almost ready to go. We are this close,
Speaker 1: and as a reward for your patience, I thought I'd
Speaker 1: give you a little gift. It's a live conversation I
Speaker 1: did with my friend Adam Grant at the ninety second
Speaker 1: Street Why in New York City a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: We've done this before at the Why when his last
Speaker 1: book came out. I interviewed him there on stage, and
Speaker 1: now he wanted to interview me, which is dante Because
Speaker 1: Adam is a very big deal professor of psychology at
Speaker 1: the University of Pennsylvania. He's written best settlers like Give
Speaker 1: and Take, Originals and Option B. It's Cheryl Sandberg. It's
Speaker 1: a winner of all kinds of awards. He's a kind
Speaker 1: of person who if you email him some question, he'll
Speaker 1: write you back in like two minutes with this brilliantly
Speaker 1: thought out dissertation and you think, how did he do that?
Speaker 1: Oh And an aside, Adam and I still use a BlackBerry.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, And since we both get a
Speaker 1: lot of grief for that, we have explanatory signature lines
Speaker 1: under our BlackBerry emails. His is sent from my BlackBerry
Speaker 1: because I'm a ludd eyed and I believe in supporting
Speaker 1: the Canadian economy. Mine is sent from my BlackBerry because
Speaker 1: there's no school like old school. Not to get competitive
Speaker 1: about this, but mine's way better. What you are about
Speaker 1: to hear is a conversation about the workplace, which is
Speaker 1: Adam's specialty. Now why exactly he thought I would have
Speaker 1: anything intelligent to say about the workplace is unclear, since
Speaker 1: I work in coffee shops. So a lot of what
Speaker 1: follows is just me pretending to know something that I don't,
Speaker 1: which has never happened before. Never. I have to say
Speaker 1: you're you're my favorite sparring partner in the sense that
Speaker 1: you really take joy in intellectual disagreement. I've discovered that
Speaker 1: I do too, and so my hope is that we
Speaker 1: will disagree on some things tonight. Good When we do,
Speaker 1: I hope you take that as a sign that I
Speaker 1: respect your opinion enough to want to change it all right,
Speaker 1: And ideally I will win more of these arguments than
Speaker 1: I lose. Yes? Is that is that fair? On ground rules? Sure? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know I'm happy to lose the arguments to you
Speaker 1: anytime you want. Great, Yeah, you should do this more often.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad you're here. So the place I wanted
Speaker 1: to start is to say that, you know, when when
Speaker 1: I think about work life, we both spend a huge,
Speaker 1: huge part of our work lives thinking about human behavior
Speaker 1: and trying to understand it and make sense of it
Speaker 1: and maybe even make it a little bit better. And
Speaker 1: I think, you know, we're both in jobs that have
Speaker 1: a pretty strong monopoly on that right, between journalism and
Speaker 1: social science. I'm curious outside of our jobs, what you
Speaker 1: would say is the occupation that has the most insight
Speaker 1: into human nature and human behavior? Well, I mean they're
Speaker 1: obvious ones. Teachers would be the first, and by extension,
Speaker 1: and then all of the professions attached to that. So
Speaker 1: my brother was a principle. I always feel like in
Speaker 1: the position he's in, he has he's a principle of
Speaker 1: an elementary school, so he interacts with kids, their parents,
Speaker 1: and then the teachers who have to deal with the
Speaker 1: kids and the parents. And strikes me that you have
Speaker 1: a very powerful lens on human beings when you're particularly
Speaker 1: because parents are never more crazy than when they are
Speaker 1: interacting with the teachers of their children. So you're going
Speaker 1: to nominate principles teachers by instinct was comedians. I think
Speaker 1: as a comedian you have to understand not only what
Speaker 1: will make people laugh, but also what's right on the
Speaker 1: edge of making people uncomfortable. And that requires a lot
Speaker 1: of insight into the immediate reactions that your audience is
Speaker 1: going to have. And so I think comedians are master psychologists. Agree, disagree,
Speaker 1: totally disagree, because who invited you? Think about this? No, no,
Speaker 1: think about this, Adam, So I have my I'm using
Speaker 1: the principal teachers as my model using the comedian. The
Speaker 1: thing that's difficult about the teacher is that the teacher
Speaker 1: is dealing with people in a natural environment in real time,
Speaker 1: and there is an infinite variety in the circumstances and
Speaker 1: the kinds of people that they have to interact with.
Speaker 1: The comedian, by contrast, is dealing with people in a
Speaker 1: tightly controlled setting with a rich set of expectations governing
Speaker 1: their behavior, where they get to turn down the lights,
Speaker 1: don't everyone with alcohol, you know, and create an expectation
Speaker 1: that laughter is the appropriate response to what they're doing.
Speaker 1: I cannot imagine a better set of circumstances, an easier
Speaker 1: set of circumstances for navigating a social situation than those.
Speaker 1: So if that's true, when are you ready for your
Speaker 1: first stand up performance? Hi? I would If you're asking me,
Speaker 1: that's not the right The best question is if you're
Speaker 1: asking me, would I rather teach a class of first
Speaker 1: graders or do a stand up performance? And the answer
Speaker 1: is I would do a stand up performance a million
Speaker 1: times before what I would teach a class of first
Speaker 1: graders really harder. I cannot wait to present you with
Speaker 1: both options and see what you really choose. But I mean,
Speaker 1: how can you it's not even close by the way
Speaker 1: stand up. One of the things that stand up comedians
Speaker 1: do that drives me crazy is that they like to
Speaker 1: pretend that their profession is this terrifying death defying, you know,
Speaker 1: high wire act. Have you ever given a performance before
Speaker 1: a group of people who have been drinking? They are
Speaker 1: putty in your hands. It's like they're just they're sitting there,
Speaker 1: they're dosed up with alcohol, waiting to be entertained. That
Speaker 1: is about as far as you can get from a
Speaker 1: room full of first graders as is humanly imaginable. I
Speaker 1: think there's some truth to that. I also think, though,
Speaker 1: that the nice thing about about kids is that the
Speaker 1: situations repeat over and over again. So you only have
Speaker 1: a certain number of ways that kids can misbehave, and
Speaker 1: that comparents can be difficult, and you get to practice
Speaker 1: over and over again the responses that you want to have,
Speaker 1: and over time that becomes a skill and it becomes expertise.
Speaker 1: Where you don't think comedians practice over of course they do.
Speaker 1: Of course they do, but your audience vary so much.
Speaker 1: Try to give an improv performance in a new country
Speaker 1: for the first time. Yeah, but they don't do that.
Speaker 1: They go to Vegas and they go to the compass
Speaker 1: seller and they go to I mean, they're hanging out
Speaker 1: with the wrong comedian. No, that's my point. They control
Speaker 1: their environments. No one controls their environments better than comedians.
Speaker 1: That's how they manage to do what they do right.
Speaker 1: And so you don't think that still requires deep insight
Speaker 1: into human behavior or psychology. Not deep insight. No, talking
Speaker 1: to drunk people requires some insight, but it's not. You
Speaker 1: may be doing it right. Now. Let's let's shift gears
Speaker 1: a little bit. I want to talk about your work life.
Speaker 1: So I'd love to hear a little bit about your
Speaker 1: creative process and where your ideas come from, how you
Speaker 1: develop them, and any insights for our audience on how
Speaker 1: to be a little bit more creative. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I did an episode of my podcast last year called
Speaker 1: The King of Tears, which is all about why does
Speaker 1: the country music can do sad songs and rock and
Speaker 1: roll can't. And one of the things, one of the
Speaker 1: points I made was something that I believe very stronger
Speaker 1: for a long time, which is the country music can
Speaker 1: be sad when rock and roll can't because country music
Speaker 1: is specific and specificity is something I've become increasingly interested
Speaker 1: in as a trait of interestingness. That all the interesting
Speaker 1: people I know are people whose speech and thinking has
Speaker 1: a great deal of specificity to it. So I was listening,
Speaker 1: for example, to a interview with Rosta Batmoglich, who's the
Speaker 1: Gazette person. Yes, he's a brilliant musician who was one
Speaker 1: half of Vampire Weekend before they broke up. And I
Speaker 1: happen to know his brother, who's also a brilliant director,
Speaker 1: and they have the same quality when they talk about
Speaker 1: what they do. There is this brilliant level of specificity.
Speaker 1: So they don't just say I really loved that film
Speaker 1: by Alfred Hitchcock, which is what ninety percent of us
Speaker 1: would say. What Zall will say is if you watch
Speaker 1: that film by Hitchcock, in the thirty second moment, there's
Speaker 1: this scene where this happens, and so and so says this,
Speaker 1: and the camera does this, and in that moment you
Speaker 1: realize this right and Ross did the same thing. He
Speaker 1: was talking about the song he'd written, and as he
Speaker 1: went through the song, he didn't he identified the points
Speaker 1: of his influence. He zeroed in on exactly the moment
Speaker 1: in the song from nineteen sixty nine that he heard
Speaker 1: when he was a kid in high school in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, and you know blue and he was here
Speaker 1: when he heard it, and that guitar, you know, and
Speaker 1: you realize that's why you listen to him. And that
Speaker 1: quality of being specific and being able to illustrate your
Speaker 1: larger points with that kind of precision is the quality
Speaker 1: of what makes something interesting everything. I've come to understand
Speaker 1: this that has informed the way I look for ideas.
Speaker 1: So I'm trying to be I'm trying to be as
Speaker 1: precise as possible in how I illustrate an idea, and
Speaker 1: to understand that in the service of illustrating an idea,
Speaker 1: you don't have to skate over that. You don't want
Speaker 1: to skate over the surface. But isn't that what you've
Speaker 1: always done, right, Like, here's a story about a statue,
Speaker 1: and oh my gosh, that changes your entire understanding of intuition.
Speaker 1: And here's a story about a hockey team or a
Speaker 1: soccer team, and all of a sudden, you know, we're
Speaker 1: going to reimagine how success works and think it's much
Speaker 1: more luck and opportunity than But I think I did
Speaker 1: it in the beginning without realizing that's what I was doing.
Speaker 1: So you asked me what my creative processes and the answers.
Speaker 1: I've only recently become kind of conscious sub it, and
Speaker 1: I realized, you know, with a podcast, you have to
Speaker 1: crank up the specificity even more so because now you're
Speaker 1: listening to somebody's voice. In order to engage someone who's
Speaker 1: only experiencing this through the ears, you need to ramp
Speaker 1: up the precision. So I have a different I guess,
Speaker 1: a different take on interestingness, which comes from a sociologist.
Speaker 1: Murray Davis, who wrote this this beautiful paper decades ago
Speaker 1: called That's Interesting, where he said ideas survive not because
Speaker 1: they're true, but because they're interesting, and you're like, huh,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. This is this is bad news. But then
Speaker 1: he's kind of proving his point in a meta way,
Speaker 1: and then he says, well, what makes an idea interesting?
Speaker 1: He says, what makes an idea interesting is when it
Speaker 1: departs from conventional wisdom. If something just affirms your assumptions,
Speaker 1: you don't get curious, you don't get intrigued, there's no surprise,
Speaker 1: and you're like, ohoo, confirmation bias all good. When you're
Speaker 1: interested is when you're like, huh, that's that's the opposite
Speaker 1: of what I would have thought, or that's different from
Speaker 1: what I would have believed. And I don't think specificity
Speaker 1: gets you there. I think if you know, if you
Speaker 1: have a really specific story that confirms everything I always
Speaker 1: thought was true about the world, I'm not that excited
Speaker 1: if you have a specific theory that I've read him
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell book generator. Once they created fake book titles
Speaker 1: of yours, and one of them that I remember was
Speaker 1: nothing What sandcastles can tell us about North Korea. Like
Speaker 1: that's interesting, right, I'm like, wow, I never would have
Speaker 1: thought that a sandcastle could explain North Korea. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so don't don't you think that specificity needs to be
Speaker 1: coupled with surprise? Sure? Good? Oh I don't arrest that case.
Speaker 1: Thank you all so much for that guy's theory of it.
Speaker 1: What's interesting? Not terribly interesting? I used to I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: So Davis then creates this is the worst thing for
Speaker 1: a social scientist to do, but he creates a typology
Speaker 1: of the interesting, and he says, there are all these
Speaker 1: different ways that you can challenge an assumption. But I
Speaker 1: think what is interesting is he says, but not all
Speaker 1: assumptions want to be challenged, and so an interesting idea
Speaker 1: is one that challenges your weekly held assumptions, whereas if
Speaker 1: you challenge somebody strongly held assumptions, they just say you're
Speaker 1: wrong or you're stupid. That's good, that's that's fun. You've
Speaker 1: been working on the fit topic around questions of what
Speaker 1: does it take to be effective or successful or a
Speaker 1: high performer? And you know, how much does my environment
Speaker 1: and whether I fit it matter? And I'd love to
Speaker 1: talk about that, So can you tell us first, what
Speaker 1: you've been doing there? Well, I had I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about basketball, because right now the NBA is this
Speaker 1: lovely little case study and fit to backtrack basketball, The
Speaker 1: kind of intuitive position of basketball is it's the sport
Speaker 1: where talent matters most and coaching an organizational fit matter least.
Speaker 1: If you put Lebron on a team of also rans,
Speaker 1: you can basically guarantee you'll make the playoffs. And he
Speaker 1: actually has made the finals several times with teams, so
Speaker 1: it's like he doesn't really matter who's with Lebron. He's
Speaker 1: you know, you can put a bunch of stiffs and
Speaker 1: it's fine. Right. In fact, the two greatest teams basketball
Speaker 1: teams of all time, the mid nineties Chicago Bulls were
Speaker 1: three superstars and then two very ordinary players. Their fifth
Speaker 1: player was a big, slow, white guy from Australia. And
Speaker 1: if you look at this Warriors of two years ago,
Speaker 1: they were three superstars and then their fifth player was
Speaker 1: a big, slow, lumbering white guy from Australia. Like doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: You could just go to Australia and like get some
Speaker 1: random guy and be he could be your fifth. So,
Speaker 1: but what's happening now in basketball There's this couple examples
Speaker 1: in this season that sort of go against that. One
Speaker 1: is that one of the best guards in the game
Speaker 1: this season was this guy named Victor Oladipo on okay
Speaker 1: See and was considered a disaster. And he simply moves
Speaker 1: teams to a new environment with a presuming a better coach,
Speaker 1: and he's longer playing with Russell Westbrook, who's probably a
Speaker 1: very difficult person to play with, And simply by moving teams,
Speaker 1: he went from being someone who was why they considered
Speaker 1: to be a bust, someone who'd be washing out of
Speaker 1: the league soon or a mediaco player into this suddenly
Speaker 1: a superstar who's kind of playing transcendently. The reverse is
Speaker 1: also true that the best coach in the league is
Speaker 1: probably Brad Stevens of the Boston Celtics. I second that,
Speaker 1: And every time a very promising player is traded from
Speaker 1: the Boston Celtics, they turn out to be terrible. Like
Speaker 1: they just leave Boston and they go into the team,
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, wait a minute. The guy actually, Jay
Speaker 1: Crowder is a good example. Everyone was like, oh, Jay
Speaker 1: Crowder is really good. Oh. Then Boston trades are like,
Speaker 1: oh god, they traded Jay Crowder. Wow, I don't know
Speaker 1: if they can survive without Jay Crowder. Jay Crowder goes
Speaker 1: to the Cleveland Cavaliers and like they all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: people realize, Oh, Jake Crowder is actually not any good.
Speaker 1: He just was good on Boston. Well, there's another piece
Speaker 1: of I think evidence for your theory, which is this
Speaker 1: season they've lost their two biggest stars and the first
Speaker 1: time they got better, and the second time they were
Speaker 1: way better than they should have been. Yeah. So it's like, now,
Speaker 1: is this always true in basketball? I don't know, but
Speaker 1: we're certainly in this moment in basketball it seems like
Speaker 1: it's very, very very coach depended. And when you see
Speaker 1: those I've given a couple those specific example and total examples,
Speaker 1: you then begin to wonder how many players on basketball
Speaker 1: teams who we consider mediocre are actually really good but
Speaker 1: just in the wrong environment. Is Victor Oladipo Is he
Speaker 1: an exception or is he part of a larger trend?
Speaker 1: And I am increasingly of the opinion that there must
Speaker 1: be lots of Victor Oladipos out there. I think there are,
Speaker 1: and I think they're not just in basketball. So this
Speaker 1: makes me think of study of cardiac surgeons where you
Speaker 1: track their performance over the course of the day, and
Speaker 1: the question is how many surgeries so they have to
Speaker 1: perform with let's say, minimally invasive robot technology before they
Speaker 1: get to the point where they're up the learning curve.
Speaker 1: And I read in a book once that an average
Speaker 1: of ten thousand hours could be helpful. That does not
Speaker 1: turn out to be the case. Practice has no effect
Speaker 1: to whatsoever in that context, and they are as deadly
Speaker 1: on surgery number one hundred and a thousand as they
Speaker 1: were on number one. And this is weird, right, because
Speaker 1: we're supposed to learn from experience. And so what Huckman
Speaker 1: and Pisano did was they broke down the data by
Speaker 1: which hospital you're performing surgery at, and they said, well,
Speaker 1: what's the effect of practice at hospital A on your
Speaker 1: performance at Hospital A versus then Hospital B. And they
Speaker 1: found that surgeries were hospital specific, so that every surgery
Speaker 1: I performed at Hospital A, at least up to a
Speaker 1: certain point, reduced the patient mortality rate by about one percent.
Speaker 1: But then later that afternoon, is a surgeon, I would
Speaker 1: go over to hospital B, and it's like I'm starting
Speaker 1: over and I have none of that experience, And the
Speaker 1: reason is I have a different team who knows my
Speaker 1: strengths and weaknesses, and we've developed a set of effective routines.
Speaker 1: And that kind of suggests that performance and skill and
Speaker 1: expertise is team specific, it's context specific. And then you
Speaker 1: see the same thing in financial services companies, and so
Speaker 1: that makes me think that people you surround yourself with
Speaker 1: really matter. Discuss does this suggest that we isn't a
Speaker 1: lot more rational for me? If I'm you know, the
Speaker 1: University of Toronto, when I want to poach Adam Grant,
Speaker 1: why don't I poach you and all of the colleagues
Speaker 1: who you think make you as good as you are?
Speaker 1: Why isn't it routine for businesses to try and hire
Speaker 1: the group? So twenty twelve, I was asked to speak
Speaker 1: at a Google event. I walked in and Larry Page
Speaker 1: was on stage and they told me they wanted me
Speaker 1: to explain how I would run Google as an organizational psychologist.
Speaker 1: What would I do differently? And this is exactly the
Speaker 1: point I made to them, as I said, you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at your greatest innovations from you know,
Speaker 1: the Google search engine all the way across, you know,
Speaker 1: a few a few more recent ones. They've almost all
Speaker 1: been a die at or a team. And yet you
Speaker 1: hire individuals, you reward individuals, You promote individuals, your fire individuals.
Speaker 1: What if you did what Grosberg calls a lift out,
Speaker 1: and you hired entire teams, but you didn't just do that.
Speaker 1: You promoted teams, you rewarded teams, and when a team failed,
Speaker 1: you fired the whole group, as supposed to the individual.
Speaker 1: And they got really excited about it. And then they
Speaker 1: did the math of how much work it was going
Speaker 1: to be to keep a team together, and they said,
Speaker 1: this is just not practical, and so instead they said,
Speaker 1: we're going to study what makes our teams great and
Speaker 1: then try to create more of those conditions so that
Speaker 1: anyone can join any team and become great. But I'm
Speaker 1: a big fan of this. Does that does what they
Speaker 1: wanted to do make any sense? Or does that sound
Speaker 1: like a Silicon Valley cop out? No? I think it
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense. So you've seen the research.
Speaker 1: Having observed that teams outperform individuals, they said that they
Speaker 1: would rather than use teams, just study the individuals in
Speaker 1: the No. No, So they wanted to study the qualities
Speaker 1: of great teams. Yeah, and how to enable any team,
Speaker 1: even if they hadn't shown excellence together to reach that
Speaker 1: level of success. It seems insanely convoluted in the way
Speaker 1: that I mean, it's not enough to take a very
Speaker 1: simple idea that a team that is observed to work
Speaker 1: well should be kept together and continue to work well.
Speaker 1: They're instead want to kind of abstract out the quality
Speaker 1: and recreate it over there. Yeah. I mean I think
Speaker 1: I think they're do you see what I'm saying? Like,
Speaker 1: I definitely, we'll get so smart that the obvious thing
Speaker 1: is no longer satisfactory. Like, No, No, Adam, I can
Speaker 1: think of a way that's way harder and way more
Speaker 1: complicated and ultimately might work as well. I think we
Speaker 1: should do that way. Definitely. No. Look, I think there
Speaker 1: are two complications. One is, over seventy five percent of
Speaker 1: airline accidents happened the first time a crew is flying together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the evidence goes so far on this that NASA
Speaker 1: did a simulation showing that if you had a crew
Speaker 1: that was well rested flying together for the first time,
Speaker 1: they made more errors than a sleep deprived crew that
Speaker 1: had just pulled an all nighter but had flown together before,
Speaker 1: and you talk to airlines about this and you say
Speaker 1: you should force right pilots to work together, Like, logistically,
Speaker 1: we can't do it, Like there's no way to organize
Speaker 1: these flight mapping schedules so that everybody is always together
Speaker 1: and that you know, I think Google has a version
Speaker 1: of that challenge, right, as do most companies. The other challenge,
Speaker 1: which which I think in some ways is bigger, And
Speaker 1: there's such a thing as too much shared experience. So
Speaker 1: in the NBA, teams max out on probability of success
Speaker 1: around three or four years together, and then once they
Speaker 1: have more than four years of shared experience, there are
Speaker 1: odds of winning go down. And maybe they're just getting old,
Speaker 1: the players by that point, but a lot of it
Speaker 1: seems to be a routine rigidity, and that you become
Speaker 1: more predictable. You stop innovating, you stop stop adapting, and
Speaker 1: other teams can develop ways to defeat you. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd worry a lot about saying, hey, we've
Speaker 1: got a really successful team, let's just go let them,
Speaker 1: you know, be great until they suck. Yeah. I do
Speaker 1: think though, that there's some interesting questions this raises. So
Speaker 1: if we go back to the idea of fit and
Speaker 1: we say, all right, so you know, we know that
Speaker 1: people perform better with a team they understand well or
Speaker 1: a team that they fit into. The natural extension of
Speaker 1: that is to say, Okay, when I go into a company,
Speaker 1: I got to figure out what the people are like.
Speaker 1: It might be values, personalities, skill sets, and I want
Speaker 1: to go join a place where I belong. And I
Speaker 1: guess two questions for you. The first one is how
Speaker 1: do you recommend doing that? And then secondly, what do
Speaker 1: you think are the problems associated with it? Well, so
Speaker 1: it's funny because they have an episode of my podcast
Speaker 1: this season where I deal with this question quite explicitly,
Speaker 1: and it's all about a very brilliant military guy who
Speaker 1: goes into at a crucial moment in this country's history,
Speaker 1: goes into government service and works for I say, non
Speaker 1: military government service. What's one of the weird things about
Speaker 1: military guys is that when they refer to the government,
Speaker 1: they don't refer to the military, like as if the
Speaker 1: military is not the government, which I always find quite charming.
Speaker 1: But so he goes into a standard Washington bureaucracy as
Speaker 1: a Marine Corps guy, and what happens is mayhem in
Speaker 1: a certain sense. He's too good for the job. One
Speaker 1: of the things he does is he realizes his predecessor
Speaker 1: had never left Washington, and this is an agency that
Speaker 1: has far flung operations all over the world. And he's like,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. And he then visits absolutely every one of
Speaker 1: the four hundred field offices of his organization in three years,
Speaker 1: at the same time as he gives two hundred speeches,
Speaker 1: testifies before Congress, writes hundreds of articles, just because he's
Speaker 1: a Marine Corps guy. And that's what they do. They're like,
Speaker 1: they're in a hurry, they're really super organized, they're busy,
Speaker 1: and they don't do a job, and they're gonna do
Speaker 1: it well. Right. That is not the way bureaucracies work,
Speaker 1: you know, and for good reason, you don't want bureaucracies
Speaker 1: run by Marine Corps guys. The worst thing that can
Speaker 1: happen if you're in a bureaucracy is that the bureaucracy
Speaker 1: gets really, really good. Right. That is the end of
Speaker 1: freedom as we know it, the thing that saves And
Speaker 1: I don't mean this, I'm not being funny, I'm being
Speaker 1: dead serious. We are our liberties are imperiled by overly
Speaker 1: competent bureaucrats. Right, So this guy who's like super super
Speaker 1: competent is it's just a tragic misfit in a standard
Speaker 1: Washington bureaucracy. Now, why isn't he adapt? Well, he could adapt.
Speaker 1: I think if he'd left as a thirty five year
Speaker 1: old Marine Corps colonel, but he leaves at six D
Speaker 1: two at that point in his career, it's more problematic
Speaker 1: than it would have been earlier. I think government service
Speaker 1: is a really good example of this, because the culture
Speaker 1: of government service is so specific and in some ways
Speaker 1: so counterintuitive that you know, we persist, for example, in
Speaker 1: this country and thinking that business success is a useful
Speaker 1: predictor of political success and it's not. Couldn't be more different, right,
Speaker 1: The kind of skills you need to navigate the political
Speaker 1: process are not the ones you learn running a company.
Speaker 1: I think where you know where this gets tricky for
Speaker 1: me is if we go back to your Marine guy,
Speaker 1: I would say, there's a study that Chad Hartnell led
Speaker 1: that was published recently which showed that the more you misfit,
Speaker 1: the more you contribute. And so if you were to
Speaker 1: read an organizational culture, we could distinguish them on task
Speaker 1: versus relational values. Right. So task oriented organizations are high efficiency,
Speaker 1: high productivity, they're all about getting stuff done. Relational organizations
Speaker 1: are much more community oriented. They're all about family and
Speaker 1: they're independent. You could be high on both, but oftentimes
Speaker 1: organizations that maximize on one don't the other. And what
Speaker 1: Chad found is that if you bring a leader into
Speaker 1: the c suite, if the organization's culture is more task focused,
Speaker 1: the relational leader actually adds more value because they're not redundant.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, I would say the marine guy
Speaker 1: is exactly right. The commandant is exactly who you want
Speaker 1: to put into government because he's providing something that is
Speaker 1: sorely lacking. Yeah, except I should have added in this
Speaker 1: specific instance, the policy that he was so brilliantly enacting
Speaker 1: was a terrible policy. Anyways, it works really well when
Speaker 1: you give you know, that task oriented person orders that
Speaker 1: make sense. In this case, we gave him orders that
Speaker 1: made no sense, got it. I guess you know. There's
Speaker 1: a paradox here, though, which is, you know, we're all
Speaker 1: happier and more comfortable in organizations that fit our values,
Speaker 1: and yet sometimes it's the ones that that diverge or
Speaker 1: clash where we can contribute the most or differentiate ourselves
Speaker 1: the most. How do you think about resolving that paradox?
Speaker 1: And you're writing a book about how we gauge strangers,
Speaker 1: how do you think about sizing up a new organization,
Speaker 1: a new culture, a new workplace, a new boss. I
Speaker 1: think that we undersample a new situations. We make up
Speaker 1: our minds far too quickly, and we're pressured to make
Speaker 1: up a better ways saying we're pressure to make up
Speaker 1: our minds far too quickly. I don't know why we
Speaker 1: would logically expect that someone ought to be able to
Speaker 1: size up a new organization in over the course of
Speaker 1: a bunch of lunches with managers there who are interviewing you.
Speaker 1: That seems silly to me. I'm happened to be a
Speaker 1: big carnt alearning the cars, and one thing I have
Speaker 1: found is that you can't size up a car on
Speaker 1: a test drive. It's the most ridiculous thing in the world.
Speaker 1: So you're about to spend an enormous sum of money
Speaker 1: on a car, and that you go for the test drive,
Speaker 1: and the test drive is basically they go around the
Speaker 1: block with you. It's nonsense, right, It's almost as if
Speaker 1: they're afraid of you actually driving the car before purchasing it,
Speaker 1: which is a very odd position for an automobile salesman
Speaker 1: to take. That they are, you know, they are anxious
Speaker 1: about you having too much experience with their product before
Speaker 1: you buy it, And they don't seem to think this
Speaker 1: is a problem. They seem to think that if you
Speaker 1: just sit in the car, you can somehow into it.
Speaker 1: You know, all that's good and bad about that. I'mobile
Speaker 1: just but I really enjoy how much this bothers you?
Speaker 1: Oh it tries. It's a car, right? If this, if
Speaker 1: this were like you can only go on three dates
Speaker 1: with someone before you're allowed to decide whether you want
Speaker 1: to marry them. I get getting upset, But this is
Speaker 1: a car. Who cares? Would you try? You're driving like
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure. Like you're like a hounday you
Speaker 1: got like a hounday from I've never driven a hunday.
Speaker 1: But a car is solely functioned. It gets me from
Speaker 1: one place to another to my point. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: care how it drives. Yeah, you really not know what?
Speaker 1: T tell us? What are you driving? I actually I'm
Speaker 1: not entirely sure what it is? My wife fixed it out.
Speaker 1: My wife loves car. She ficked it out, and I
Speaker 1: drive it. Okaysially interesting, all right, A couple of other
Speaker 1: things I want to ask you about if you were
Speaker 1: the CEO of a large company. What are the first
Speaker 1: policies you would either kill or create that would change
Speaker 1: the way that work life is experienced in your organization. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's super interesting, Well, i'd like I mean, I'm very
Speaker 1: in my way. Back in Tipping Point, I wrote about
Speaker 1: this whole idea of keeping groups under one hundred and fifty,
Speaker 1: and I thought about that since, and I do think
Speaker 1: that I would try and keep the sections of the
Speaker 1: company small and independent under one fifty if possible. I
Speaker 1: just think people enjoy themselves much more when when they
Speaker 1: know everyone that they're working with, and when there is
Speaker 1: that extra element, when there is that social bond in
Speaker 1: addition to kind of formal things keeping people together, that's
Speaker 1: just much more powerful. I would take people's physical health
Speaker 1: far more seriously. I think that if you that, I mean,
Speaker 1: it sounds very Scandinavian. And why didn't you say that pejoratively? Well,
Speaker 1: because if you're Canadian and you grew up in the
Speaker 1: seventies in the eighties in Canada. One of the principal
Speaker 1: advertisers in Canada is the Canadian government, and which is
Speaker 1: unusual because it doesn't happen here. But and what the
Speaker 1: Canadan government used to do, what far more actually in
Speaker 1: that period, is that they would buy all this time
Speaker 1: on the radio and TV to make certain arguments about
Speaker 1: how we could be better Canadians. And inverybody the arguments
Speaker 1: about being better Canadians involved holding up Scandinavians as a
Speaker 1: role model. So they would always tell us that, well,
Speaker 1: the Swedes live, you know, four years longer than the
Speaker 1: average Canadian, and or the suite you know, the Norwegians
Speaker 1: are running twenty miles a week, whereas the average Canadian
Speaker 1: runs barely at all. I mean it almost like so
Speaker 1: as a kid, constantly like walking around with this kind
Speaker 1: of vague anxiety that I was not living up to
Speaker 1: the Scandinavian model. Secretly those ads were funded by the
Speaker 1: Scandinavian governments. But I always I mean, with the passage
Speaker 1: of time, I've come to look more fondly that, and
Speaker 1: I still think they have a lot of things right, um,
Speaker 1: you know, like if you go to Amsterdam and everyone's
Speaker 1: cycling to work and you just think, how fantastic is this?
Speaker 1: And the thing is it works because everyone's doing it.
Speaker 1: The thing all of our problems was cycling to work
Speaker 1: had to do with the fact that we don't want
Speaker 1: to be the only person on the road cycling, right,
Speaker 1: But once everyone's cycling, it's fine. So if and that's
Speaker 1: sort of what they've understood in Amsterdam, like my I
Speaker 1: once had dinner with my Dutch publisher who was a
Speaker 1: woman in her sixties, and it was it was March,
Speaker 1: and at the end of dinner she disappeared into the
Speaker 1: bathroom and emerged in a wet suit. I was like, like,
Speaker 1: where are you going? And she was like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: cycling home now and she underwater. No, I mean I
Speaker 1: want to say that. I mean like a you know,
Speaker 1: like a full on kind of zip up and she uh,
Speaker 1: she got into bicycle and she she rode eight miles
Speaker 1: through the rain home and she did that every day.
Speaker 1: I just thought that was so fantastic. Anyway, were I CEO,
Speaker 1: I would like to somehow. I just think people are
Speaker 1: much happier when they get a chance to regularly exercise,
Speaker 1: and sadly that doesn't most people's schedules don't allow for that.
Speaker 1: So as an avid runner, what does that look like?
Speaker 1: Does your company have exercise breaks built into the day.
Speaker 1: My company's clearly not going to make a lot of
Speaker 1: money since we're going to be working out a lot,
Speaker 1: but it would be really and really healthy. You know.
Speaker 1: My far made for me to hold up Joyce Gloudbell
Speaker 1: as an example of that's my mother as an example
Speaker 1: of work life, because my mother had a very unique
Speaker 1: perspective on work, which was it never occurred to her
Speaker 1: that the point of work was to make money. She
Speaker 1: had a whole list of things that came first. But
Speaker 1: what if Joyce Gloudbell was great observations was that whatever
Speaker 1: she got a job, as she had in the second
Speaker 1: half of her career, she the first thing she would
Speaker 1: do is she would go to her boss and she
Speaker 1: would say, look, I know I could work full time,
Speaker 1: but it's plaintless I can get if you let me work,
Speaker 1: you know, halftime, I can get just as much work
Speaker 1: done and I'm going to be happier and you're gonna
Speaker 1: be happier. And they would always agree. After she pointed
Speaker 1: out that this was and I think she's kind of right.
Speaker 1: That much of what people do can be accomplished if
Speaker 1: they are happy and well rested, and can be accomplished
Speaker 1: in some fraction at the time they currently spend on
Speaker 1: the job. So I'm not sure whether my company loses money.
Speaker 1: I think a reason we productive place. My father, a mathematician,
Speaker 1: once was offered a job at Yale, and so he
Speaker 1: left for the weekend to go and for the week
Speaker 1: to visit Yale, spend a week there, came back and
Speaker 1: we were all on pins and needles. We'll be moving
Speaker 1: to New Haven, and he said, so, you know, what
Speaker 1: was it? What was it like? He was like, no,
Speaker 1: it's not happening. I's like, We're like, why you didn't
Speaker 1: like Yale? Yale famous place he goes. I got in
Speaker 1: there at nine o'clock. They are all their desks. I
Speaker 1: left at five. They were still at their desks. He's
Speaker 1: not gonna work. When you came out with David and Goliath,
Speaker 1: I remember talking, and you know, I was I was
Speaker 1: thinking that you're you wrote this book about underdogs because
Speaker 1: you love to root for the underdog, and you said no.
Speaker 1: And to this day I'm surprised and puzzled about why.
Speaker 1: And I'm hoping I can get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1: Why do you root for the favorite? I believe that's
Speaker 1: the only truly empathetic position to take, and that you're right.
Speaker 1: I feel a lot of empathy for the New York Yankees.
Speaker 1: Rooting for the underdog is a form of moral weakness,
Speaker 1: and I'll explain why. So you have two people are competing.
Speaker 1: One person is expected to win, one person is not
Speaker 1: expected to win. Right. If the person who is not
Speaker 1: expected to win doesn't win, they are mildly disappointed, but
Speaker 1: not massively disappointed because they didn't expect to win. If
Speaker 1: the person who is expected to win doesn't win, they
Speaker 1: are massively disappointing because the gap between their expectation and
Speaker 1: reality is enormous. They're suffering. They go home devastated, their
Speaker 1: lives are over, They want to give up everything. They
Speaker 1: go through a massive soul searching. They wander off into
Speaker 1: the desert without water or food. Their lives are living hell.
Speaker 1: If you are a truly empathetic person, where does your
Speaker 1: sympathy lie with the person who's like, well, I didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't win, but you know wasn't gonna win anyway,
Speaker 1: so it was a point. Or is your sympathy with
Speaker 1: a person who is wandering helplessly through the desert without
Speaker 1: benefit of food and water because they lost something that
Speaker 1: they had every expectation they would win. Where's your heart
Speaker 1: at them? You're like, oh, I'm gonna go with the underdog. No,
Speaker 1: that is so sick, twisted, six twist, callous. There's so
Speaker 1: much wrong with your reasoning there. I don't know where
Speaker 1: to start. So first of all, I will grant you
Speaker 1: the point. Tim Urban's here in the audience, and he
Speaker 1: has this great equation that says happiness is reality and
Speaker 1: minus expectations. And that's true. And so I think you're
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right that the favorite is going to be
Speaker 1: more disappointed if they lose then if the underdog loses.
Speaker 1: But what you're not accounting for is all the joy
Speaker 1: the favorite had the last five times the Patriots won
Speaker 1: the Super Bowl. So I don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: empathy for Tom Brady. He still has his five rings,
Speaker 1: he still has his chin. He's gonna be fine. Whereas
Speaker 1: the Eagles, you know, suffering through many, many years of
Speaker 1: almost great. No, it's not about it's a recent and
Speaker 1: salient example. As a native Well yeah, anyway, but think
Speaker 1: about think about the fact that the Tom Brady has
Speaker 1: a whole bank of joy built up over decades, and
Speaker 1: poor Nick Foles has been struggling his whole career and
Speaker 1: he gets to catch a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1: You can't reconfigure the kind of principles of human psychology
Speaker 1: in service of your own Philadelphia inferiority complex. That's essentially
Speaker 1: what's happening here. Though you are on home turf. This
Speaker 1: is not fair. But no, I could play the story
Speaker 1: out for any group, right, the teams that have won,
Speaker 1: the individuals that have already been on top, they have
Speaker 1: already enjoyed the fruits of experiencing that. Here's a problem
Speaker 1: with this, don't you wait a minute? Hold on. You
Speaker 1: claim to believe in social justice. Yeah, you do, and
Speaker 1: so you basically want to maintain inequality and just let
Speaker 1: the winners keep winning. And yet you wrote a whole
Speaker 1: book about how you want to create opportunities for David
Speaker 1: to become Goliath, so you should be rooting for David.
Speaker 1: The book was an abstract exercise in understanding how a
Speaker 1: socially maladaptive outcome, the underdog winning couldn't be understood. That's
Speaker 1: all Let me let me last thing. Let me just
Speaker 1: explain to you how I first came to this understanding.
Speaker 1: What you are overstating is the degree of joy that
Speaker 1: accompanies an underdog's victory. The reason you're overstating it is
Speaker 1: you're forgetting the circumstances under which underdogs win. So I
Speaker 1: first and most clearly formulated this principle of rooting for
Speaker 1: the favorite during the nineteen seventy six Montreal Olympics when
Speaker 1: Greg Joy, who was the overwhelming favorite too in the
Speaker 1: long the high jump, lost to a Polish guy, Vloodeck,
Speaker 1: something who was nothing, who was like not even a
Speaker 1: good Why because it rained that day and Greg Joy
Speaker 1: depended was a very technique driven high jumper who needed
Speaker 1: absolute precision in his When he planted his foot before
Speaker 1: he jumped, it was raining and wet his foot. He
Speaker 1: was slipping and sliding. He lost, and like Vlodeck one
Speaker 1: right now, Vladeck, for the rest of his life would
Speaker 1: look at his gold medal and say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I only really won this because it was raining. Wait,
Speaker 1: hold on, no one ever thinks that way. Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a tainted, hold on, tainted victory but even today,
Speaker 1: even today he looks at he's got it. He's probably
Speaker 1: hisn't have it in his in a case on his wall.
Speaker 1: He's probably got it in a tucked away and because
Speaker 1: he's slightly ashamed of it. And his daughter says to him, Dad,
Speaker 1: how did you do in this haventy six Olympics? And
Speaker 1: he says, I don't want to talk about it because
Speaker 1: it's a little you. I cannot let you get away
Speaker 1: with that. You have claimed that that Ross and Nizabeth
Speaker 1: gave you your worldview with the person in the situation,
Speaker 1: a book that they wrote based on their research and
Speaker 1: attribution theory, which showed very clearly in a shown for
Speaker 1: decades that human beings naturally attribute failures to external forces
Speaker 1: and successes to internal forces. So Vlodok is going around
Speaker 1: thinking I am the world's greatest high jumper, and not
Speaker 1: only that, I was able to be great on a
Speaker 1: day where it rained when I was in a serious disadvantage.
Speaker 1: So eat that, Greg Joy. I'm I'm not gonna change
Speaker 1: your mind. I can tell it's fine, go back to
Speaker 1: But are you going to change yours? No? Are you
Speaker 1: don't the underdog to have a chance to just experience
Speaker 1: for a moment. The joy of being on top, it's tainted.
Speaker 1: Let's let's take some listener and audience questions. This is
Speaker 1: from Kelly. She wants to know how often you assess
Speaker 1: your career goals and how your goals have changed over time.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I have career goals just to
Speaker 1: be left alone, and basically I can't let that one go.
Speaker 1: You've made these these shifts in turns. Right, So you
Speaker 1: started a podcast, you were writing a TV pilot at
Speaker 1: one point. You must be trying to accomplish something in
Speaker 1: terms of your influence in the way that you spread ideas.
Speaker 1: Is there's not a goal there? Well, I don't want
Speaker 1: to get bored, I think, I mean, it's serious. I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's anything more than that that I'd
Speaker 1: like to try. The podcast was I wanted to try
Speaker 1: something new. The screenplay was I wanted to try something new.
Speaker 1: The writing books was I wanted to try something new.
Speaker 1: I left the Washington Post to do magazine writing because
Speaker 1: I wanted to try something new. I mean, I wasn't
Speaker 1: unhappy in any of those places, but I just thought
Speaker 1: the most fun I ever had in a job was
Speaker 1: most fun was at the Washington Posts hugely fun. But
Speaker 1: at a certain point you just you realize, well, there's
Speaker 1: more to life than just this, right, so you should
Speaker 1: try something else, all right, Sean wants to know, I
Speaker 1: recently started a new job, and I'm curious when it's
Speaker 1: appropriate to begin disagreeing or expressing a different opinion. How
Speaker 1: would I know? I haven't had a job in yours.
Speaker 1: The one time when I had a job to watch
Speaker 1: the posts, I felt that the best way to be
Speaker 1: at work was deeply passive aggressive. That is that you
Speaker 1: should never express your disagreement in a straightforward way. You
Speaker 1: should rather quietly and in a kind of behind the
Speaker 1: back sort of way, make your feelings known. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that I felt, you are such a
Speaker 1: disappointment to adults. This was this was the most important
Speaker 1: thing I did watch. The most was I realized very
Speaker 1: early on that the way to make sure that you
Speaker 1: were given assignments that you liked was to never do
Speaker 1: a good job with assignments that you didn't like. And this,
Speaker 1: this is called strategic sloppiness. This, yeah, is so routinely
Speaker 1: violated by people. So at the Washington Post, we had
Speaker 1: an editor who was obsessed with weather stories. If there
Speaker 1: was a hurricane, he wanted to send twenty people there.
Speaker 1: And nothing is less fun than covering a hurricane. And
Speaker 1: so the hurricanes would come, only we wouldn't be sent
Speaker 1: down on mass And I could see I was no dummy.
Speaker 1: I could see what a trap this was, because there's
Speaker 1: like two or three major hurricanes a year they last,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean some of them can be You
Speaker 1: can spend two weeks in some storm ravage town in
Speaker 1: South Florida like this is just not No part of
Speaker 1: this sounds interesting to me. So I was assigned there
Speaker 1: was a hurricane that was hitting the outer banks and
Speaker 1: it was centering a town on Columbia, North Carolina. Where
Speaker 1: did I go? Columbia, South Carolina. And I called in
Speaker 1: and I said, sun shining here. I don't know what
Speaker 1: you guys are talking about. And then when they got angry,
Speaker 1: I was able to use my trump card, which was
Speaker 1: I'm Canadian. I didn't know it was two Columbia's. Who
Speaker 1: did what you thought it was a good idea to have?
Speaker 1: By the way, think about this, who thought it was
Speaker 1: a good idea to have a Columbia North Carolina and
Speaker 1: a Columbia South Carombina is there's such a shortage of
Speaker 1: names of cities that before they separate the two Carolinas,
Speaker 1: they're squabbling over who gets to use Colombia, Like there's
Speaker 1: a short list, and like Columbia's on the list, and
Speaker 1: like the whole thing's ridiculous. And yet when I wanted
Speaker 1: to not be handed, you know, tasks that I thought
Speaker 1: we're not a good use of time, like sitting on
Speaker 1: a committee to determine furniture purchases and just let its
Speaker 1: fall to the bottom of my priority list and didn't
Speaker 1: do a good job at it. You traveled to a
Speaker 1: different city in a different stale to get out of
Speaker 1: doing the job. That the thing is you had to
Speaker 1: make a statement. So it's not enough to be kind
Speaker 1: of if you if I was just kind of routinely incompetent, fine,
Speaker 1: they can deal with that. They have routinely incompetent people
Speaker 1: on staff. They would just throw me back into the
Speaker 1: fire the next time there was a hurricane. So this
Speaker 1: is I need to be spectacularly, like they need to
Speaker 1: think Glable doesn't even know where North Carolina is. We
Speaker 1: can't send them how to do hurricane coverage. So it
Speaker 1: was like that was I thought a lot about that
Speaker 1: one before I pulled that particular stunt. I feel so
Speaker 1: proud to know you right now. Different question, if this
Speaker 1: is from Brad. If blue collar jobs are replaced by AI,
Speaker 1: how do you stay relevant as a worker? I wonder
Speaker 1: whether our blue collar jobs the ones that are going
Speaker 1: to get replaced by AI, or a white collar jobs
Speaker 1: the ones that get replaced by A. That would be
Speaker 1: my first question, because I keep hearing really interesting predictions
Speaker 1: that focus more on the displacement of cognitively complex So
Speaker 1: if you think about like there was a great article
Speaker 1: in the New York Times about by someone saying, you know,
Speaker 1: autonomous vehicles don't put truck drivers out of work because
Speaker 1: truck drivers do a lot more than drive trucks. They
Speaker 1: do a whole bunch of personal tasks that require a
Speaker 1: person that a machine can't do. So the actual driving
Speaker 1: part is just some small So what you might have
Speaker 1: is a situation where you have a human in the truck.
Speaker 1: Only the humans not driving all the time, but you
Speaker 1: still need the human check on the cargo, managed to
Speaker 1: make sure the truck is working properly. You know, meet
Speaker 1: with a person when they're picking you know, but if
Speaker 1: you know a lawyer is doing document search, you know,
Speaker 1: that seems to me really straightforward for AI, you're just
Speaker 1: trying to eliminate lawyers. No, no, no, no, not at all,
Speaker 1: But I mean that would be I know the lawyers
Speaker 1: are quite worried about it, and I think appropriately. So
Speaker 1: how does one stay relevant? I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: answer is that you just need to be The obvious
Speaker 1: answer is good at the things the machine is not.
Speaker 1: I'm not an alarmist about a I happen to think
Speaker 1: that there are so many things that we need people
Speaker 1: to do that are not being done right now that
Speaker 1: most of that involve communicating with them and empathizing with
Speaker 1: them and helping them out. That displacement of in some
Speaker 1: areas is not gonna is not the end of the world.
Speaker 1: It just means that we'll be able to focus a
Speaker 1: lot more on people who are in need of help.
Speaker 1: Stewart and Dave both submitted basically the same question, which is,
Speaker 1: you wrote about Enron a long time ago. What lessons
Speaker 1: did corporate America fail to learn from that debacle that
Speaker 1: we're still in need of learning. Well, there's so much
Speaker 1: fun about the Enron case. Fun things you said, fun. Yes, fun.
Speaker 1: Thing number one is which is the thing that I
Speaker 1: wrote about at the time. Well, I wrote two en
Speaker 1: Ron articles. The second one was better than the first.
Speaker 1: In the second one, I pointed out that Enron was
Speaker 1: an example of a scandal in which everything that was
Speaker 1: used to bring down Enron was material in the public
Speaker 1: record put out by Enron. In other words, to know
Speaker 1: what Enron was doing wrong, all you had to do
Speaker 1: was to read the material that Enron had given to
Speaker 1: the public on what Enron was doing. And the reason
Speaker 1: it took so long to bringing one down is that
Speaker 1: basically no one ever read the stuff they were putting out. Now,
Speaker 1: this raise is a really interesting question. If everything that
Speaker 1: was used to end Enron was based on stuff that
Speaker 1: Enron told us, then what did Enron do wrong? So basically,
Speaker 1: if you think that Enron was a fraud, and you say,
Speaker 1: I know they're a fraud because here in their ten
Speaker 1: k's they detail all the crazy things they're doing, But
Speaker 1: they told you they were doing crazy things. So what's
Speaker 1: your case? Why would you buy the Enron stock if
Speaker 1: Enron told you they were doing crazy things? Maybe you
Speaker 1: didn't read the ten K which you're supposed to do
Speaker 1: if you buy a lot of Enron stock. So it
Speaker 1: gets very confusing. It's not the same, in other words,
Speaker 1: as the woman at Pharaonos. What's her name, Elizabeth Holmes,
Speaker 1: Sinzabeth Holmes. So there's now a case against Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 1: That's very different. So she was pretending to do X
Speaker 1: and in fact doing we think doing why, that's fraud.
Speaker 1: But if I tell you I'm doing why, and then
Speaker 1: I do why and you say, wait a minute, you
Speaker 1: did why, you should go to jail, that's confusing. So
Speaker 1: as long as I tell you, So, if I tell
Speaker 1: you I'm going to defraud you, you're okay with it. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I don't. I'm not saying I'm okay with it. I'm
Speaker 1: saying it's a different kind of crime, and it's one
Speaker 1: that I don't really understand anymore. I'm used to the
Speaker 1: model that the conman is trying to con me. I'm
Speaker 1: not used to the model with a con man says
Speaker 1: before he cons me, here's how I'm going to con
Speaker 1: your Doug wants to know what actions you recommend young
Speaker 1: professionals take to shape an organization, even though they might
Speaker 1: not be in charge yet. And I feel like we
Speaker 1: need to disclaim that we don't necessarily want to follow
Speaker 1: your career advice. But what what advice would you give
Speaker 1: you want to change an organization, a culture you don't like,
Speaker 1: policy you think is broken, Not be passive aggressive. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing it's a good question. I don't know if I
Speaker 1: have a good answer to that. I when I think
Speaker 1: back at my time in a large organization Washington Post,
Speaker 1: the thing that was most frustrating to me was the
Speaker 1: extent to which people, over time in an organization put
Speaker 1: the needs and desires of those on the inside ahead
Speaker 1: of the needs and desires of those who they're serving.
Speaker 1: So there was a famous case of a very, very
Speaker 1: brilliant reporter who was fired from the Washington Post because
Speaker 1: he was difficult to work with. But there was very
Speaker 1: little understanding of the fact that what made him a
Speaker 1: brilliant reporter was the same thing that made him difficult
Speaker 1: to work with, and that you if you fired everyone
Speaker 1: who was difficult to work with at the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have a newspaper anymore, you would, you know?
Speaker 1: And I thought it was odd that that an editor
Speaker 1: didn't consider it as part of their job description, the
Speaker 1: ability to work with difficult people, Right, that's why you
Speaker 1: do that job, and that's what makes you good is
Speaker 1: that at that job. And there's a point at which
Speaker 1: sometimes people get so kind of immersed in their environment
Speaker 1: that the reader who you're supposed to be serving falls
Speaker 1: away and you just think about what would make your
Speaker 1: life better. So I guess in answer to that question,
Speaker 1: one simple ways to keep keep reminding yourself and those
Speaker 1: around you what the point of your organization is who
Speaker 1: you're serving. But go back to the sampling. So, how
Speaker 1: long do you want with someone and how are you
Speaker 1: vetting them? And vice versa? How long do you hire peoples? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have your assistants to work for you. I've been
Speaker 1: very lucky with them. Only there's only one I ever
Speaker 1: got rid of because it didn't work out. What happened
Speaker 1: was it very rapidly became cure to me that she
Speaker 1: was a bad assistant. But it also, at the same
Speaker 1: time became cure to me that she was a wonderful
Speaker 1: person and so deeply hilarious that she couldn't even send
Speaker 1: an email that wasn't an absolutely brilliant piece of work
Speaker 1: that would reduce you to you know, helpless scales of laughter,
Speaker 1: and so that really changed my perspective on hiring because
Speaker 1: I was like, what I was I willing to give
Speaker 1: up competence in her job for the delight of being
Speaker 1: your emails and the answer is absolutely so. I was like,
Speaker 1: you know, as long as they bringing something interesting to
Speaker 1: the table, I'm happy. I do feel like the record
Speaker 1: needs to show that you just said she was brilliant
Speaker 1: because she was hilarious. So I stand by my comedian
Speaker 1: quite from earlier. She was anest This has been incredibly fun.
Speaker 1: Thank you for green to join us, for sharing your
Speaker 1: pad advice and your interesting ideas and your wisdom and
Speaker 1: your arguments that have inspired so many of us to
Speaker 1: ask more interesting, deeper, bigger questions. It's a real honor.
Speaker 1: I want to thank you, Malcolm, and thank all of
Speaker 1: you for being here. You've been listening to me and
Speaker 1: Adam Grant at the ninety second stre Why in New York.
Speaker 1: This interview is the final episode on the first season
Speaker 1: of his podcast Work Life with Adam Grant, which is
Speaker 1: part of the Ted podcast network. It's a great show,
Speaker 1: Adam being Adam doing all kinds of fascinating interviews with
Speaker 1: people about workplace life. If you're curious about what everyone
Speaker 1: else does from nine to five, or, as the case
Speaker 1: may be, seven to ten, give Adam's show a listen
Speaker 1: on Apple podcast or wherever you're listening to this show.
Speaker 1: And for those of you waiting on the first episode
Speaker 1: of Revisionist History, it is just around the corner.