YouSaid · the spoken record

Margaret Heffernan

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2018-03-13
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2018-03-13
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  1. “And he asked some really hard questions that would always stop me in my tracks, and they always made everything we did better. And I think he found us rather baffling, and I think some of us found him baffling, but there was no doubting his goodwill in serious intent. And so I think to the degree that we had a process, we all had to feel in our different ways that the decisions that were being made were for the good of the business. And this has been a kind of, I guess you could say hobby horse of mine, which is I always thought as chief executive, my job was to do what was right for the business, which would not necessarily be what I wanted or what I liked or what was fun or what was easy. You know, I just thought the only job description is what's right for this business. And I think we all, you know, I think we all felt that, that there's just a point at which when we came to discuss crucial decisions,”

    2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Oh, I'm pretty sure I didn't. Which is to say to the degree that we had a structure, we had a good senior leadership team in which debate was pretty easy. I mean, I remember, for example, having my senior leadership team, a really lovely guy named Will Richmond. And Will was what I think of perhaps unfairly as a classic Harvard Business School grad, which he was. So very, I think what you would call rational, very logical, very thorough, very careful, very different from me, in other words.”

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  3. “Need a constraint, and actually my biggest danger is that I'll accept insane constraints and only afterwards realize, actually, Margaret, you just agreed to do something impossible. But I like constraints. I like doing things I've never done before. I like trying to do something that I recognize from the outset is going to be difficult”

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  4. “Well, I had an investor who argued with me quite a lot and was a brilliant guy. And I think we both understood it wasn't personal. So that was terrific. I had a hardcore people that I worked with for quite a long time and with whom I developed very high levels of trust and respect and freedom and safety, which is we could be very open with each other. I think a certain amount of pressure, I think that when I worked at the BBC at one point, I made a documentary where I had a huge budget and a huge amount of time and it's hands down the most boring thing I've ever done. I mean, not for me, for the audience. I researched it to death. And what that taught me was actually, I like having some pressure, you know, not insane pressure, but I do pretty well under pressure.”

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  5. “Conducive to creativity or productivity or perfectionism or whatever you're pursuing because I think this notion that you can do wonderful work regardless of context is romantic and naive.”

    2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Two very different things. And I think it takes a long time, even maybe I'm just talking about myself, I think it takes a long time to look back and think, well, in those situations, I did good work. In those situations, I did less good work. What was the difference? Because obviously it's me in both places. So what were the conditions in which it was easier for me to do better work? And it's interesting because I think that, you know, we often tend to think, well, if I did good work, that's me. And I think one of the things I'm constantly probing is, of course it's you, but it's also the environment and the context in which you're operating. So what is the context that's really...”

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  7. “Well, I think often, especially when you're not wildly grown up, it's really easy to take it personally. So and so argues with me that means they don't like me, right? So you need a certain maturity to think beyond that. And especially if you have a very competitive mindset, of course, you've kind of got to get over that. So it takes a certain degree of maturity and it takes a certain amount, I think, of intellectual rigor, which is, do you want to get it right or do you just want to win?”

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  8. “And it certainly sharpens your own understanding if you are prepared to take it on board and think about, well, if that were true, what would that mean for what I see? Am I missing something? But I think, you know, obviously we're living through a phase where mostly people aren't prepared to argue with each other. They'll abuse each other in public. They'll abuse each other in social media. But they won't have what I think of as the real argument, which is let us together from different perspectives explore this territory and figure out what's going on here.”

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  9. “Well, sometimes, of course, it is, right? I mean, I'm not that naive. I know there are times people have argued with me at work, you know, not because they had my best interests at heart, but because they wanted my budget. So these things definitely do happen. But I think that, you know, when you're in a really good collaborative environment, the argument is about that's not good enough. How do we make it better? Is the crucial kind of dialogue to have. But of course, people will argue with you because their ideologies are different, in which case maybe they see something you don't, so it behooves you to listen to them.”

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  10. “And I just think that's such a phenomenal model of collaboration, which is the argument is a gift. And I think about this both in terms of business or writing or family life. You know, somebody who's prepared to listen and understand what you're saying well enough to argue with you, this is somebody who cares. And so it's just a very kind of fundamental part of the way I think”

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  11. “You must be missing something. You absolutely must be missing something. So what's the counter argument? And some of that is, I mean, I just, you know, I just feel there's a sort of a demon on my shoulder saying, yeah, really who says so? How do you know? And it's also, of course, that in my book Willful Blindness is this story about the epidemiologist Alice Stewart doing a study of childhood cancers and her terrific collaboration with the statistician George Neal. And George, who was very introverted, once said of his work with Alice, my job is to prove that she's wrong. Because if I can't, then she knows she should persevere.”

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  12. “Because I'm really trying to talk about what I see as happening rather than trying to boil it down to a couple of do these three things and everything will be okay because I just don't believe it's true and I do this is going to sound really pretentious and pompous but I do have a very bedrock belief that as the writer's Cyril And so I do care probably disproportionately about trying to get things right. And that means they're not going to be simple”

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  13. “Well, it's much easier. It's much easier. It's much easier to think that something is either good or bad or black or white or alive or dead. And of course, there are binaries in human life, right? You either are alive or you are not. And it's much more dramatic and we like drama. I just don't think it reflects the complexity or the richness of life very well. And I think that it oversimplifies to the degree that much that is wonderful, fun, and full of opportunity in life gets kind of run over when you simplify it that much. And it's kind of interesting because I think, I mean, I think about this quite a bit in the sense that I think a lot of my books are probably more complex than the genre. Likes, but perversely, I don't really mind.”

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  14. “It's very scary, right? Because I run five companies and I've written five books. And now I think if I were a numerologist, I'd be extremely anxious and looking for a new career right now.”

    2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And I wondered why. And, you know, so I used to wonder why you'd have a huge number of creative people doing very uncreative work. I wondered how you could get huge numbers of perfectly decent people doing really terrible things. I think I was highly driven to run companies in a desire to try to not do that. And this is very characteristic of female entrepreneurs, which is the sort of sense that I want to prove that it's possible to be successful and not do some of the crappy things that traditional managements do routinely. So I think, you know, I think all of those things were kind of very, very big motivating forces, both in the companies that I ran and in the books that I've written.”

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  16. “How does that happen? Well, you know, that's my whole book. Will for blindness is really how that happens. But I always felt That wasn't about rationality or irrationality. It was all sorts of stuff. Kind of distracting or sending people on detours from themselves.”

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  17. “I don't really think specifically about rationality versus irrationality. I mean, I'm pretty allergic to anything binary, which is probably strange having run software companies. But, you know, I really, I think anytime I hear, well, it's either this or it's that, I know I'm being sold a pup. I think my experience is there's always more intelligence and talent in organizations than manages to get out and to surface and to be deployed. And I've always wondered why and where does it go and why does that happen and where does it get stuck and trapped? And I think also I have always felt that it is in organizations specifically that very good people can go bad. And I've been endlessly fascinated by why or how that happens.”

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  18. “Is interesting enough to you that you might have something to say. I think that's pretty much the kind of combination of events that led to it. And it's fair to say, you know, before that, I'd written a number of screenplays and radio plays and radio programs. And people had always said, wow, Margaret, you write really well. So it didn't feel like a completely bizarre concept.”

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  19. “And also at the time, so this would be the early 2000s coaching was a pretty kind of Wild West arena and it wasn't an area I wanted to go into. And a friend of mine who's a literary agent in London said, Margaret, you should write a book about the internet. And I thought about it for a long time. And I thought, actually, it's either too early or too late. I'm not sure which, but it's I don't have anything very interesting to say. And the world's full of books with nothing very interesting to say. So let's not add to that. But it did get me thinking, well, what would I like to write about? And so I think, you know, those different things, the wanting a business with no employees, the encouragement by my friend, the literary agent, and the great question was, you know, what”

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  20. “Good question. Well, I had run five businesses and I had got to the point of thinking I don't want to do this anymore. I had hired and fired so many people. I was fairly burnt out. And I remember going to a fast company retreat of people that, I don't know, writers and people they thought were interesting. And somebody there, and shame on me for not remembering who said to me, you know, Margaret, just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it forever. And that really stuck with me. And I thought, well, I don't have to run companies forever. That's cool. And I thought, so what I want to do next is I want some sort of business that requires no employees. Now, at that point, your options are pretty limited.”

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  21. “But it does mean that you kind of have to remember who helped you. And people whom other people want to help are very good in remembering those things. I mean, you know, for me, one of the most fun parts of writing books, actually the most fun part of writing a book is writing the acknowledgements, you know, because it's really fun to remember and to keep track of if you can all the people who helped you. But it's also a way of saying thank you.”

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  22. “They definitely don't, you know, Adam Grawl, of course, is brilliant on this subject. They don't want to feel that they'll be taken advantage of. And as Adam has shown, people have quite a good sense of who the takers are. But I think they also like to feel that their contribution has value in the best way for them to feel that is for somebody to tell them. Now, this doesn't mean that every day you go.”

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  23. “It's not something you just save for out of work time. I think that's really fundamental if you really believe that the value of collaboration lies in the kind of aggregation or compounding of talent and creativity, then you have to have an environment in which people are really prepared to help each other. And people are only really going to be prepared to help each other if they will feel that they in turn will be helped when they need it. And if you feel that not egregiously, but respectably you might get a bit of credit for your contribution because people don't like to feel invisible quite rightly.”

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  24. “Yeah, well, I think it is very, I mean, obviously it's really important who you hire. It's really important the signals you send to them as to the kinds of behaviors you want. I think that having kind of critical people who appreciate the generosity is a business characteristic.”

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  25. “Understand what the kind of cortical behaviors are if you're really going to change a culture, which is, after all, a stupendously difficult thing to do.”

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  26. “And the other thing is the chief operating officer acknowledged to me that actually the real, you know, they paid lip service to collaboration, but really the reason they'd done it is it just saved them a fortune in real estate costs. So I think there's a lot of restructurings that isn't necessarily strategic, although it's wrapped up as that. And I think there's also a lot in these restructurings that doesn't appreciate that actually the crucial thing here are the sort of social bonds between people. And that doesn't have to take a fortune to address, but it is going to take time. And it is going to require that people understand why it matters as a business issue. It's not that we've all just become Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. And it does require...”

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  27. “Well, I mean, the data suggests that most of them won't work. The other thing people do, of course, is they think about silos and what they do literally is knock down walls, which I think is kind of comic. So they knock down walls and they get a whole bunch of sofas and then they think they're done. And it's really interesting. I did some work with a big multinational chemicals business some years ago and they did exactly this. And two things happened. One is they really had one of the most viciously competitive cultures I've ever seen in my life. And so none of that changed. Fat people were more withdrawn because they no longer even had offices in which they could be safe and generous to the few people they trusted.”

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  28. “To think quite carefully about where are these sources of competition coming from and what can I do to make it advantageous for people to help each other rather than compete with each other”

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  29. “And what all of that does is it implies that if I help you, you might do better, which by inference means I do worse. So I'm now pretty, you know, if I'm thinking about this and if I feel threatened or anxious, then I'm not going to help you. And I might know exactly the person who could help you solve your problem or exactly the piece of information that would, you know, help you develop your product or whatever. But I may be quite reluctant to do that because of both the kind of implicit and explicit kinds of competition that exist within the company culture. And I think that however much you say, you know, we're all in this together and we all need to help each other.”

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  30. “May have had very competitive pushy parents, you know, the prompt predominant metaphor for business in the US is around competitive sports. So there's an awful lot of competitive mindset that comes into a company, whether you ask for it or not. And when you add onto that systems like Force Ranking and hierarchies, you foment necessarily status contests.”

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  31. “I think there are a couple of things. I mean, so I think there are kind of In other words, some of this happens organically, and some of it does happen, sadly, deliberately. So the stuff that's deliberate is to do with definitely there are leaders out there who believe that the more people compete within an organization, the smarter and the better the organization will be. pretty spectacularly misread Darwin and Darwin is no evidence that Darwin was a social Darwinist and they've introduced systems like forest ranking and forest ranking in effect get pits everybody against each other and bear in mind certainly in the US that most people at the US end to be honest the UK most people are coming out of competitive education systems they”

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  32. “Or not knowing what other people need. So to the degree that people are open and generous in information flows quickly, it'll find the problem that it is destined to solve. But all of the distances between people, all of the distrust or just ignorance as to who people are and what they care about slows that flow down.”

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  33. “And that isn't automatic. And I would even argue and have argued at some length that in fact I think there's a lot that happens to people as they're growing up that if they did that naturally to begin with they learn how not to do it. Instead, how to regard each other as rivals and competitors. So you're only really going to get the value out of organizational life to the degree that people begin to feel safe with each other, to trust each other, to want to help each other. And the way I think about that these days is, not surprisingly, I think of it as a network and I think of all the collective knowledge of the organization flowing through that network. And what impedes the flow is distrust rivalry.”

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  34. “Well, I think the basic thing is that in any organization, the whole premise of organizational life is that together you can do more than you can do in isolation. But that only works if people are connected to each other and it only really works if they trust each other and help each other.”

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  35. “It was quite interesting because many, many years later I was talking about this at an HR conference in Boston. And unbeknownst to me one of my former employees was actually in the conference and in the Q&A session she put her hand up and said I was there, it was absolutely transformative. And she remembered virtually every detail of these sessions. And, you know, so I think this is about as simple as they come. But it was really my rather lame but effective attempt to get people to see each other as human beings, not as titles, not as tasks, not as experts, certainly not as rivals, but just to, you know, what I would now call build social capital.”

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  36. “And it really was beyond awkward, I have to say, because it felt very clunky. But I honestly was at my wit's end and I just didn't know what else to do. So I thought, what the heck, let's give this a shot. And, you know, to be honest, the engineers mostly did PowerPoint presentations and the marketing people mostly did kind of stand up comedy routines. But what it did is it stopped people looking at each other in terms of function and made them start to look at each other as human beings. And it was absolutely transformative in the way that people started to relate to each other and talk to people and talk to people in the lunchroom and sometimes even spend, you know, go to a movie together or see each other at weekends or whatever.”

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  37. “And I thought about this and I was trying to figure out what's wrong. Is it just that this is the US? It's not the UK and companies sound different. But I just felt it was all a little bit too tasky. It was a little bit too tactical. And what I chiefly remembered for my companies in the UK was at the end of the day and definitely on a Friday people would go to the pub and wait for the horrible London rush hour to subside And I thought, well, this is Boston. And about eight months of the year, it's winter. And everybody drives and there aren't any pubs. So that's definitely not an option. And so I thought, well, what the heck? I'm just on Friday and just going to tell everyone to down tools at Harpless 4. And every week three people are going to tell us who they are and why are they here.”

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  38. “Well, I guess the easiest one for me to talk about is the one that I did within one of my companies. So, as you probably know, I've spent most of my life in England, but in 1994, I moved to the US. My husband got a position at Harvard. And after looking around a bit, I ended up running tech companies for a venture capital firm. So the first company that I was running, I did what you would expect, which is hired all sorts of extraordinary and wonderful people and gave them all sorts of hard problems to solve. And my observation was that everybody came into work and worked very diligently and went home again. And the thing I chiefly remember is it didn't sound right. There wasn't a sort of I think of as a sort of jolly hum. And it certainly didn't sound like companies I'd run in the UK.”

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