YouSaid · the spoken record

Frances Frei

lines on the record: 142
first: 2017-07-26
most recent: 2017-07-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, it's okay. Listen, I don't. If you just take the taxi industry, which is a really wonderful industry for very many people, but had a lot of protective regulation for people to come in and change that, took a certain amount of aggressiveness. So like everything, it's your best feature and your worst feature. So, I think that the pioneering aggression was part of the fantastic nature of it. And then out of control, are you then surprised that it's not harnessed? If it's not deliberately harnessed, will it be harnessed? No. So it has to now be deliberately harnessed. But we should be held accountable 100% for all of it.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think to me, it's a mentality of hypergrowth. Hypergrowth probably is more likely to occur in tech because of zero marginal cost. I think it's the mentality of hypergrowth, which is it's super easy to see in retrospect when you should have done it. It's really hard in going forward.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of them did. A lot of them did man at Facebook, I'm thinking. Every company I covered is able to do that. What happened here? One of the things I got from, you get from Silicon Valley, and especially from Uber, is like, look at the success. So therefore it's okay. And I was like, well, look at the journey. Your journey is super important.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it was conducive for ridiculous growth, of which there aren't a lot of role models for how do you organize for growth. In retrospect, oh, we should have taken a pause and trained managers and done things differently. But I have a lot of humility of looking forward. Like, how do you know when the right time to take an off ramp is?”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a siloed organization that as soon as we unleash the power of teams, the performance of this organization is going to skyrocket.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Travis had pairwise relationships with everyone. And when he asked me to come in, he asked me, he said, look, I haven't had enough time to spend with this senior team. Will you come and facilitate the senior team so that we can bring the best out of the collection? And I said, absolutely. And indeed, it's not just a problem with the senior team. It's all throughout the organization.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a very big situation which permitted its growth and created a lot of the problems. So we now have a collectively exhaustive”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that if we each of us has unique information, if we spend time with one another, we are very likely to talk about the information we have in common Job of my job as a coach or a facilitator, I help bring out the unique information so that we can take better decisions and move with more speed.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's that mean? So leadership, I mean, here's the thing Uber has got individual leaders that have been very siloed, which has permitted it to grow. And it's A plus B plus C for a three-person team at best. And I'm just coming in and making it A times B times C.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, we were going to talk about how that's been swept away because you did manage to lose a CEO along the way. Sweeping these boulders or whatever they are aside. I think that's reinforced concrete.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought about this a lot in anticipation of this because two reasons. One is that. Thought it would be a great idea she understands me and my potential and I trust her instincts completely. And honestly the situation required all of me. I don't think I could have been very helpful as a consultant. And I have to tell you, I have been mesmerized by the 15,000 people that work there, mesmerized. And so I honestly think it's pebbles, not boulders. I really do. And I have seen enormous progress in sweeping them away with really world-class people.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so my intra week is that I have breakfast with the family on Mondays. I fly out and then I take a day flight back on Fridays. So I have dinner. So I have breakfast on Monday, dinner on Friday. Right.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, my favorite trait in the world is redemption. If you have bad people, we should have exorcism, but the vast majority when there's bad behavior, it's good people behaving badly. And I know that leaders can make a difference there.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was a consultant, because I had to make sure they needed a lot of management training. It turns out that management is a skill. They had not been absorbing it. And I had to make sure that the way I teach is the way they could absorb. It was just magnificent. The emails, the response was incredible. So I haven't seen the toxicity. I 100% believe the organization, it manifested to where we are now. The organization is taking it super seriously.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, so listen, I read the newspapers and I thought there was no chance they were going to be the good guys. No chance. And then every single person I spoke with, I then started looking for where is the toxicity. And I found a lot of people looking for the secret memo on how to behave. And if you gave them the secret memo, they behaved that way. I didn't find toxicity. And I looked, so before I made the decision to go over, I did sessions. I spent time with 1,200 people. So there's 15,000.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you have to understand when I got involved, Leanne had already, like it was, Leanne had already joined and was doing things. Susan Fowler had been doing even more things. So I got involved when the really, really earnest and super serious version of Uber. And I thought it was magnificent. I still do think it's magnificent”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I only have one gear. That they had no unusual challenges. Every single challenge I saw, I had seen in another organization, but the context was super novel. And they honestly did not seem... The challenges seemed outsized to them, so I often go through the world and you think you have a boulder in front of you and I can help you understand it's a pebble. They had a lot of pebbles and maybe not the wherewithal to sweep them away.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Leanne. So Megan Joyce was the first person I met, and then she introduced me to Leanne. Leanne is the head of the head.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sorry. I was going to get an enron joke. So I study service companies and Uber is a magnificent service organization. But if a service organization either gets outsized ambition or gets in trouble, I usually get a call because I'm pretty good at diagnosing problems and helping people come up with prescriptions. So I got a call with Uber and what I do with every organization is I go in and see, can my... Snowflake be helpful. And I quickly found out that it could, and then I had to, so I, am I a good fit? Because I hate doing anything that someone else can do. And then are they the good guys? And I've learned in California. I'm not supposed to say, guys, I was progressive in Cambridge. I'm conservative in San Francisco. Super weird for me. Super weird. Yes.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I find that the majority, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the world wants to bring their best facet forward and we can create the conditions for not the best facet to come forward, again, our obligation.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that everybody's part of it, and then they improve. Because I meet Maria Clawway at Harvey Mudd did a lot of experiments about that and often found a single person who wrecked the experience for everyone, not just women or people of color, that it was typically a certain kind of male geek who brought everybody down in a lot of ways. And there were certain men who didn't like operating that environment either.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Haven't heard that one. It's awful. Well, I do dislike when the diversity problems or the burden of the diverse, that's just obnoxious.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's literally my least favorite word besides reportreneur that I also don't like. I haven't heard that one. It's awful. Don't use it again. But it was the idea of getting men involved as allies and not just that it was in their best interests. Correct. That it's not only a woman's job to fix this, that it's.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we did a bunch of things, and it's now self-reported. So here's the awesome thing. Not only did women's satisfaction go up in international students, men's satisfaction went up. Like, it's not a fixed pie. Make the world better for women, you make it better for everyone.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think social engineering Get to bad need that there are architects and we have to take responsibility for it. And just because if things are systematically happening outside of the classroom, it's the obligation of the university to address it. So, of course, it's on our watch. It was on our watch. And we were not invited in to do it And I think that we're often not given permission to do the things that need to be done.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the students are incredible there. And with accountability, and then they found that roasting strangers is a really, really lowbrow way to get at humor. And you can do it in super clever ways. So now they're magnificent celebrations and appreciated by everyone more.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the international sexist, but like every is. And so we made that discussible and we put in place something that if you lead an event and the person who's doing the section handoff is leading an event, everyone's responsible for their own behavior. But if you lead an event, you're responsible for the behavior of everyone else at the event. Because we're a school of leadership. Well, wow, did that change things?”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. And it became an arms race of, so you would show pictures of people and it became almost a roasting of people you don't know Which is in really bad form”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, oh, nobody had watched this. Great. Okay. So the one story that just stuck with me is that some students called the spouse of an international student who English wasn't their first language and got the spouse to say things that they could cobble together on a tape and they played the cobbled together things in the section handoff that sounded very bad. They did it for sport. It was enormously hurtful.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Created more conditions for people to thrive, and then that became contagious across all of them. We also went in and talked explicitly about some troubling things that had happened in the past, so I think it's really important to honor the past and to discuss it. And there were some systematic, unfortunate things that happened every year, such as... When you go to HBS, you become assigned a section. So if you're in section B, when you go from the first year to the second year, you're old B, new B. The old section would come in and tell you what does the traditions are. And it was like an arms race of doing increasingly inappropriate things nobody with bad intentions, but it got really bad. And so we went in and started business.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And what was awesome is that not only did different demographics thrive there, it changed the demographics of who thrived in the large group class discussion.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of money, yeah, okay, yeah. So 50% of every grade at HBS is based on class participation. If you didn't talk early on in the semester, it was hard to dig yourself out of that hole. So not everyone who arrived at campus was ready to participate in large 90-person discussions. So we made small group experiential as part of the curriculum. And your grade was based on not only your performance as a team, but how other people experienced you.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which is like an awesome word that you should reclaim. It's like one of the most awesome words on the planet. We need to be more unapologetic about doing noble things.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I didn't have any data to show that they were wrong, but had some strong senses that it probably wasn't the case. So we did an experiment on all 900 students. They would call themselves guinea pigs. I refer to them as pioneers. And we closed the achievement gap and the satisfaction gap.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there were two things that were super troubling that I learned. One was that men achieved higher grades than women, and men had higher self-reported satisfaction than women. And then if I say men and women, it also holds for a whole bunch of other demographics. And a lot of people had hypotheses for why they thought that was the case. And we acted as if those hypotheses were fact without testing them”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm a professor in the technology and operations management area, taught service management to a third of the audience. And then I've been a dean on the faculty recruiting side on the executive education side, helped transform the MBA experience where we hadn't created the conditions for everyone to thrive.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a great time. And they're like, no, Harvard, and I go Yale is so good. It can go on, and they're like, and I'm thinking how stupid can it be to have gone to Harvard and not understand that I'm trolling you. Harvard said to me.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I do with Harvard people? Sometimes people say, Oh, I went to Harvard because people from Harvard tell you they went to Harborough within 14 minutes usually, 14 to 18 minutes. And so when they go, oh, I went to Harvard, like this is 30 years later for some people, right? And they go, I went to Harvard and I say, where's that? And they're like, Boston, I go, oh, MIT, what a great school.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you can either give positive reinforcement, keep doing what you're doing, or constructive advice to do things a little differently? I'd say there's constructive advice in there.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, and I have to tell you, I get lovely reactions because maybe because I ask people for feedback. So before anyone can say anything to me, I ask, if I'm going to a car, I say, you know, I work at Uber. Do you have any feedback for us? And people have feedback and then really great suggestions.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if I don't get it, I ask for it. Because I think it's an important company, it's an organization filled with mortal beings who want to do the right thing and we should do the right thing.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. I do. When I joined Uber, I didn't intend to wear a t-shirt every day, but I will tell you that when you change your shirt, a t-shirt, you can't wear pants after when I wear jeans every day. And then if I wear jeans, I have to wear comfortable shoes.”
2017-07-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Frances Frei, SVP of leadership and strategy, Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT