You're listening to Leading Up with Udeme. This podcast is your guide to developing your skills as an emerging or seasoned leader. I'm Alan Todd, your host and the Vice President of Leadership Development at Udeme. Together, we can work, lead, and live differently to create a better world. This week, to kick off our sixth season of Leading Up, I'm speaking with Harvard Business School Professor, author and leadership expert, Dr. Francis Frey. I think the big aha for everyone is trust is so important in business, and she just has an incredible framework for how to think about it and solve for it and build it.

The three component parts of trust are that you will involuntarily trust me if you experience three things from me simultaneously. And that is if you experience that I'm authentic, if you experience my logic, and if you experience my empathy. And said differently, if any one of those is missing, there doesn't matter how much of the other two there are.

I was super excited to have Frances Frey from Harvard Business School on the podcast today. In addition to her thought leadership at Harvard Business School, Frances took a of absence to spend time in the corporate world as Uber's Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy. Her work with wife and co-author, Anne Morris, has taken her through Fortune 10 companies, political campaigns, and to the airwaves of their podcast Fixable from Ted. Their new book, Born out of their experience and research, is Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leaders Guide to Solving Hard Problems. Frances has been on my shortlist of dream guests for a long long time now, and I'm thrilled she's here today to bring her deep well of knowledge to our leading up listeners. Frances, welcome to the podcast.

Oh, I feel like you're welcoming me to the family, and I'm in. Let me just start with that. I'm in.

Oh, beautiful. Here's what I want to start with. Every time I see you, you have a gigantic smile on your face, and it telegraphs beautifully. I just think about the gratitude you must feel for the gifts you've been given, the enjoyment you receive from your work and your life. So I just want to know, am I getting that right? Have you figured that out?

Yes, but the listener should know I am old, so this is what happens at the end of decades. I would love for people to learn how to do it much quicker than I did because it wasn't always like this. But you're absolutely right. I am in a sweet spot of things. I think I'm a slow learner, and I look forward to your listeners learning how to do it much more quickly.

Yeah, I love it. Well, one of the things we've talked about, we've had a number of people on Bob Quinn from University of Michigan, nick Craig, teaches at HBS sometimes, about purpose. And you strike me as someone who is living your purpose. You got there, right? You've got the wisdom, the battle scars, and I think you're as authentic and purpose-driven as they come. So I'd love to know, how did you discover your purpose? How did you come to it so that we might think about for our early career people, how they might not have to wait an extra decade to figure things out.

Yeah. So I did it by having a plan and then completely disregarding the plan. I think both of those things are really important. I think it's important to have a plan because it just makes us in control. And then I think it's really important to have the humility to realize we couldn't possibly have forecast everything in the future and to go away from it. So that's what I would say first, have a plan and disregard the plan, but the plan still helped. The second thing is, after I graduated from college, if I all the way back to the day, I was sure that my profession was going to be a college basketball coach. I was a college basketball player. My identity, up until then, was completely wrapped up in basketball. So that was my plan. I went and got my PhD because there was a basketball coach who was known as Dr. Tom. And I thought, oh, well, that's a nice way to differentiate. So I'll have a PhD when I do it. It wasn't until playing basketball during my PhD program that I blew out my knee. And then I was like, maybe I shouldn't be a basketball coach.

Now, that should show you how wacky my reasoning is. What difference does it have if I am an able or disabled person in coaching basketball? It should make no difference. But it got me to question my identity. Then I said, well, are there other ways I might coach? That was coincident with just happening to a professor got sick at Wharton. I was a doctoral student, and they asked me to step in and teach the class, which was unusual thing to do. I said yes, which made no sense. And everyone advised me not to. Don't take time away from your studies. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. But I said yes. And I think that's an important thing, to take advantage of odd opportunities as they come across. And that changed my life. And I realized the coach part was right, but it's not a basketball coach. It's coaching knowledge. It's coaching the development of people. And once I got into the classroom there, I never left.

So how did you decide, okay, I want to be a professor at Harvard Business School. I want to write leadership books. I want to go fix broken companies. Where did you go from, I'm a doctoral student at Wharton, and I did a stand in to where you are today?

Yeah, well, I'll go back even a little further. So I am very ambitious and very competitive. I'm not sure where that came from, but I am. And so I applied to Harvard out of high school. They said no. Out of high school, I applied to get my PhD in the doctoral program, they said no. When I graduated from Wharton, I applied to Harvard as a faculty member, they said no. Harvard said no to me five times. One of the lessons I take from that is that I don't let the decisions of mortals influence my life's trajectory. I knew that Harvard was going to be a good place for me and that I was not revealing that appropriately to whoever the decision-makers were at the time. I took as much responsibility for that as I put on their shoulders for not being able to see it. I would say that there was a relentlessness of... I know so many people who take a no and they're like, Oh, that must be the plan. That's the universe talking to me. I do not hear no that way. When somebody says no to me, I hear not now.

I think that has made all the difference for me.

I think that not now is absolutely beautiful. I think that stick-to-itiveness is what got you where you are and allowed you to enjoy the benefits of the career that has unfolded it to find your inner self by not allowing somebody. I heard you say, They had a bad breakfast, a bad day, and you didn't get in. That's the rest of your life?

Not a chance. Not a chance. Am I so whimsically putting the rest of my life in the hands of another person?

Okay, so you're working happily along at Harvard Business School, and then in 2017, you decide, I'm going to take a leave of absence and take an impossible job 3,000 miles away at a company that was as toxic, unrestrained, incidents of sexual harassment, discrimination, bullying, aggressive behavior towards employees. All of that was written in the press. And so I want to... Did that decision...

What was I thinking? Yeah.

Well, did it scare you Or did it energize you to make that decision?

Well, I never planned on leaving Harvard. Once I got there, as you can imagine, my intention was to stay. A former student called me and said, Will you come and talk to our CEO, the founder and CEO, Travis Kalnik? And I said, respectfully, no, because I've read the press. I read what you just said, and I was like, no way. I only help good people win. I believe I can help anyone win, so I have to take care. I only help good people win. I was like, this is not a good person. She said, I think what you're reading in the press distorts the reality of who he is. Would you do me the favor and come meet with him? Now, this was so long ago that we used to fly across country for a two-hour meeting. I don't think anyone 2024 would do it, but I beautifully... I said yes, it was a student asking, was a student that I trusted and adored. And so I flew across the country for two hours, expecting it to be courtesy. And then my flight was taking the red eye home that night. I wasn't even going to stay overnight.

Gosh.

That two-hour meeting became a three-day meeting. I changed my flight home five times. And Travis and I just spent days together going through every single question I had. And what I discovered at the end of it was that the previous company that he had run had eight people. When I started talking to him, he had 13,000 people. And he was asking for help. And I thought he was a really good person, a really good person who had gotten out over his skis, of course, on a few dimensions. And what mattered to me, redemption is my favorite It's my favorite thing in the world. And he wanted to fix it. So that was the first part. That was the emotional part of why I was intrigued. The other reason was it was as bad as you said. And I also thought, if I can go there and be part of fixing it there, it gives license to everyone else who surely has problems that are not as significant. So it will be a blueprint for everyone on how to fix things, even even when they appear dire. I also very much liked the extreme sport example of it so that it would give license for everyone who is in less extreme conditions.

I love studying extreme positive or negative outliers.

It's so instructive. It's so rich. Yeah, so rich with learning. So rich with learning.

Yeah. So when you parachute in, how do you decide what to do and how do you decide what to then do first?

Well, the conversations we had were in April, and I didn't start until June first. And so what I did in the meantime was I wanted to get to know the organization. And I think I met with 1,500 people before I started. And what was super clear to me right away, one, this was the greatest group of learners I have ever been around. To this day, this was the greatest group of learners I've ever been around. And here's why most of them had engineering degrees, and they went to work at Uber as a first job. It was in hyper-growth. So they got promoted to managers five minutes after arriving. And five minutes after that, they got promoted to manager of managers. No one ever taught them how to lead. I do not blame the individuals for not having been taught how to lead. And when we did teach, oh, my gosh, they were as if they were starving and they just devoured the content, which is what allowed us to go so quickly. So one is I wanted to make sure that the way I taught matched the way they learned. It did. And then the things that I observed were the issues.

This was an environment that had no trust amongst any stakeholders. And so we learned how to teach people how to build and rebuild trust rapidly at scale. I traveled to a lot of places around the world where they were located to make sure that it was cross-cultural as well.

So let's unpack trust a little further. I think there's a lot of lessons there. And for anyone that hasn't seen your TED Talk on trust, it's an absolute must see. But just a broader frame is trust is eroding politically, spiritually, business leaders. It's down everywhere. I follow the Edelman Trust barometer, the Gallup Trust in Institutions data, and the picture is fairly bleak. So you study this. Why do you think trust is low? Or why is this such a big problem in major institutions and societally, not just in America, but everywhere.

I'll use the political as the example for it. I actually think that there is not a desire to build trust. The only thing holding us back, it's not the capability to build trust, it's the motivation to build trust. Our political parties are so invested in the rationale that for you to like me, you have to dislike them. Then when I talk to them, for you to like me, you have to dislike them, and we just go back and forth. There is no desire for trust. The only thing that is missing is the desire. We can teach trust, how to build trust and how to rebuild trust to anyone with one exception. We cannot provide the motivation. But we haven't found a single instance, whether it's in politics, organizations, individuals, where people that have wanted it have not been able to do it. Because now, to your point, it's really well understood how to do it. But it is insidious where people don't want it. There aren't very many politicians that at the end of the day, don't benefit from us against them. Well, you can't build trust when you make a two-dimensional caricature of the other side.

Yeah. Let's take this, bring this down to I'm at work. What is the damage of low trust and what is the reward of high trust? I'm trying to get at solving for motivation here. I'm a leader, and I don't sense we have high trust. Let's explain why we don't get to go fast, you say, if we don't get this right.

Here's the value proposition for the leaders that are listening right now. The value proposition is you will get to accomplish higher quality at faster speed. People will ask you to compromise less if they trust you. If they don't trust you, they're going to ask you to water down every single idea you have until it was hardly worth having an idea at all. If they don't trust you, whatever decision we make in the room, they're going to relitigate it outside of the room. Things are going to take a long time, and we're going to have to compromise all of the power out of our ideas. The value proposition of trust is higher and faster. If you don't have a foundation of trust and you try to move fast, you will move fast and break things. So it is everything. You can move fast and fix things. In fact, when you move fast and fix things, you can go even faster than when you move fast and break things. But the difference is you need the prerequisite of trust. It makes all of the difference.

Okay, so what's the trust triangle? You've diagnosed this hundreds of thousands of times. You've started, you do everything. And you've said, I think, that you can narrow it down to one of three things almost every time, and there's not a fourth. So if that's true. That's insanely powerful.

It's insanely powerful. And listen, I want there to be a fourth time. So we've done it with hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of organizations, and every single instance of trust can be traced back to one of three things. The three component parts of trust are that you will involuntarily trust me if you experience three things from me simultaneously. That is if you experience that I'm authentic, if you experience my logic, and if you experience my empathy. And said differently, if any one of those is missing, there doesn't matter how much of the other two there are. An overabundance of one does not make up for a shortfall of another. That way, it's almost useful to think of it as a stool. If you make one leg really long, does it make up for a short? No, it doesn't. We need sufficiency in all three of them. And this works individually. It works for teams. It works team to team. It works for families. It works for organizations. It works for societies. This is as generalizable as it gets.

Let's talk about how to identify it or diagnose it. You have some great 8 examples, but I want to hear about the wobble, and then we'll think about, how could I use that tomorrow to figure out what's going on at my company?

Yeah. So here's what I would say. If you're reflecting on this, one, realize that people are experiencing your authenticity, your logic and your empathy every time they trust you. And you are surely trusted most of the time. So it's not that you don't have these genetically. You have access to authenticity, logic, and empathy. But here's what we know. Go to the small subset of times when you weren't able to earn someone's trust, and I'm really talking about earning someone's trust. Go to the times when you had a skeptic and ask yourself to the best of your ability, what do you think your skeptic was doubting about you? It's a multiple choice question. Were they doubting your authenticity, your logic, or your empathy? Whichever that was, we use the word you just said. We call that your trust wobble. Now, it's a funny word. It's a word that's meant to make you smile, not feel panicked. It's also a word that, well, I can steady a wobble. It's not debilitating. It bounces back a little bit. And whichever your trust wobble, we have clear prescriptions for how to overcome them. But if you have misdiagnosed your wobble, the most beautiful prescriptions in the world won't work.

So this is really a matching of the diagnosis to the prescription. And so much of the unproductive work on trust is solving the wrong problem.

Can we maybe give an example at Uber We Work? I thought those really brought it home for me.

Good. So at Uber, when I got there, they had an empathy wobble. When every time they had a skeptic, regulators thought that they didn't care about the regulators or about the geographies that they were regulating. Their investors thought they didn't care about them and their opinions or their money. Drivers thought that they didn't care about them and their livelihood. They had the same problem in multiple places. Which actually is one of the reasons we got to solve it so quickly, because it's much easier to solve an empathy wobble everywhere than an empathy wobble here, an authenticity wobble there, and a logic wobble there. Uber had an empathy wobble super clearly. Now, it might be that one of the reasons that I was a good messenger is that personally, I'm an empathy wobble. So if I lose trust with someone, it will rarely be because they doubt my authenticity, and it will rarely be because they doubt my logic. And the form of empathy wobble I have is that my impatience sometimes gets the better of me, and people can feel it. So that was Uber. We work, they had a logic wobble, and that really came to the head when they filed the documents for going public.

And they had the best advisors in the world. They had the best lawyers, the best financial people, the best season. So you would expect... Who had brought companies public so often. So you would have expected to see a really tight document that tell the world we're going to go public. And instead, it was crazy town what came forth. I mean, I don't have any other words. I mean, I was there and none of us saw a draft of this document. In fact, we were all... Everybody knew what was coming, and then something else happened, and then this magical, mystical document with new metrics. We're not going to use the metrics that... It's not only does physics not apply, but even the language of business doesn't apply. It was illogical, and it was a huge logic wobble, and they just never were able to recover from it because they never acknowledged that they had a logic wobble. And once you have a problem, you got to go address that problem. You can recover any trust if you have the motivation to do it. But they did not have the willingness to confront the absolute irregularity of what that was and how it reliably made people feel.

The buzz around Gen AI isn't going anywhere. Leaders and managers are key to identifying how their companies can use the technology and creating a plan to grow their employees' skills. Learn how Udemy can help at business. Udemy. Com/genai-now. So we've jumped out of order on move fast and fix things. So you have a core message, and I love it. Operate with urgency, be wildly ambitious, and fix as much as you can along the way. So let's introduce the book now. I think it's almost like your trust triangle. To me, it's like E equals MC². It's like a perfect equation. Your Monday through Friday metaphor is a thing of beauty. It was so thoughtful. How on earth you came up with it? I don't know. But as I read it, having read a lot of business books, you just took a completely different approach.

Yeah. So I think what makes us a little bit different as writers and as an academic myself, I have the advantage of that I understand the theory and I participate in the practice. I probably participate in the practice more than most academics. And I probably understand the theory more than most practitioners readers. So Anne and I really do get to have a pretty unique stride. And we do all of our work together, and she is a magnificent thinker and writer and makes everything better. So when you read it, it sounds like you read it as a how-to manual, and that's exactly what it is. And we have the humble audacity to say, This is how you move fast and fix things. And these are the problems that typically get in the way. I'll tell you where the impetus came from is that we studied all of the big changes that we could find. We never heard a single person say, You know what? In retrospect, I wish I had done less. Nor had we ever heard anyone say, You know what? In retrospect, I wish I had gone slower. And Yet, so many change initiatives that we were involved with, people that were so caring and devoted to the institutions, cautioned us to do less.

Oh, the pace of change is too great. You're sure you don't want to do less? Oh, the magnitude of change is too great. Are you sure you don't want to go slower? Or whatever it is. So people are constantly on the sideline, luring you to do less and go slower. And what we realized is, close off the exit gates. And that is what's the difference between getting it done correctly or not. Because there are so many people in what we call responsible stewardship that are devoted to the organization, but they're rooted in the past. And they think that they're so fearful of the future that they would rather incrementally improve from the fast. Then confront the really serious problems that are right in front of them.

Let's start with Monday, because the way you frame the book, we can't go fast before Friday. There are some things we have to do first. So on Monday, it's problem solving day. It's an area where I believe a lot of people get this wrong, and they're doing a lot of work, pursuing a lot of action. They think that they have to take action. They want a sense of urgency and a bias to action. I hear it all the time. But if you start to really unpack what they're doing, I think they're misdiagnosing the problem. So can you talk about Monday, why that's the most important?

Yeah. So we call it identify the problem. And so there are problems. You can consider that's the root of the trouble. But that root manifestsates in a variety of symptoms. If we treat the symptom like the root, we're going to be solving symptoms, and that is an infinite game. The symptoms will never go away until we address the root. And so what most of us are doing on Monday is we're saying, Here's the symptom. Let's have a bias for action, and let's go after the symptom. And that's going to lead to fatigue. It's going to lead to no It's going to get us to not want to do things later. So Monday, go from the symptom all the way down to the root. And the way to think about doing that, and I take inspiration as an operations professor, the first really world famous operating system was the Toyota production system. The language that they used for this root cause analysis is what it's colloquially known as, but they called it the five whys. Because what they said is, whatever the symptom is, ask yourself Why does that exist? And whatever that answer is, ask yourself, why does that exist?

And they found that there were, on average, five whys between the symptom and the root. And most of us either address the symptom or we address one why. So I would say, if you haven't done a minimum of three whys, I think you're in the infinite game of addressing symptoms. You're not going to make much progress, and you are going to build cynicism.

And for us to have a meeting in which we're going to ask why five times What do we have to do? Psychological safety, suspend, disbelief, et cetera.

Yeah. So I think that for finding the real problem, one is you want to really celebrate problem hunters. And sometimes Organizations insidiously don't celebrate problem hunters. The number one way they do that is they say, Don't bring me a problem unless you bring me a solution. That is lunacy. Problem identification can be a solo sport. Solution identification, that root cause analysis, that is not a solo sport. One is we have to really elevate the art of problem hunting and problem identifiers. You want to just celebrate that activity. When you bring together people, don't bring together people who are going to go from the symptom to the cause. They all think like one another. You got to bring together a variety of people. But then here, I think, is the critical ingredient. Bring curiosity to bear. Don't bring preconceived judgment. The thing about curiosity it is they're the opposite of one another. They don't coexist. Most of us, when we come to problems, we bring judgment. We need people who can activate curiosity when necessary. One, so it expels judgment. Two, that we have a chance of going from like, Oh, why does it exist? Why does it exist?

That's an intensely curious episode. But people that are experts and they know the answer super hard, I usually don't bring them in on Monday. Yeah. They stop us way too early because of all of their pattern recognition.

It's the know it all versus learn it all.

And here I would say it's the curious all all versus the judgment all. I'm not sure. Somebody in branding is going to have to come up with a better form of that. Yeah.

Well, I like you say in the book, curiosity drives innovation, it lowers conflict. It's a free, abundant, and renewable resource.

It is a free, abundant, and renewable resource, and it is the most crucial thing for Monday.

Yeah, I love Okay, so let's move to Tuesday, day 2, second thing. I think we covered that in building trust. So let's move on and assume we can't go anywhere without a trust architecture, trust foundation. Now, let's go on to make new friends.

Yeah. Here's the thing about human nature, and this doesn't make us bad people, it just makes us people. We really like people who are really like us. We tend to give them uncommon favor. We tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. When people that are different than us, our number Our common instinct in treating people that are different than us is try to find out what we have in common with them. I'm saying it in a way that I hope we laugh at it. That is the least useful way we can capitalize and benefit from someone that's different from us is to ask them, let's only dwell on what's in common. So what we want to do on Wednesday is we want to seek difference and dwell on what's uncommon. And this is why Anne and I are such a magical partnership. We have some things that are in common, but the majority of our strengths are uncommon common to one another. So we get the benefit of both. Well, I want to take that and apply it everywhere. That's what make new friends are. One, invite people you wouldn't typically invite to the table.

And two, know that they're going to try to please you by saying what's in common. You're going to try to make things feel safe by asking for what's in common. Both of you, I want to try to get you to dwell on what's uncommon. The most interesting thing about you from a problem solving perspective for me is what you know that different than me. So I want to invite people that have the potential for more difference, and I want to dwell on the uncommon. And that's what Wednesday is.

Yeah. And I think that's if we look at research on harnessing collective intelligence or the predictive nature, that the more diverse you get, the better a team performs.

But let me be clear. The more diverse you get, the higher the potential for performance.

Yeah, good point.

But I am sure many people who are listening have been on diverse teams that have stalled. And one of the reasons is because we're asking people to dwell on what's common. And if you become really diverse, you have very little in common, and you got no way to make progress. So, yes, attract as much difference as you can. And then celebrate what's uncommon. The other word for uncommon is unique. Celebrate uniqueness. And then we're going to wildly outperform.

Yeah, got it. So if we're solving the right problem, we've built a foundation of trust, and we've got a highly diverse team where we celebrate uniqueness. We've got some of the right foundations.

Now you're onto it. I am sure whatever you came up with on Monday, that team is going to make enormous progress on Wednesday.

So let's talk about change leadership. So we're going to get into Thursday, and we've got to become better communicators.

Yeah.

So why don't you tell us how you frame that?

So here, let me first tell you why we need to be better communicators. If I am with my team 24/7, I don't have to be a very effective communicator, right? Because you're in my presence. If you don't understand something, you just ask me. If I observe that you're not doing something right, I just gently step in. So as long as we're in each other's presence 24/7, we don't have to be effective communicators. Communication is how do we influence into our absence. So if you have teams that are working outside of when you're working or at other geographies. So communication is only really necessary for our absence. And the way to think about what is the role of communication? Whatever it is you said that I can listen to on replay, so whether it's your voice, watching the video, your written document, whatever it is, is it as good as if you were here and I could ask you? That's what we want to do. That's what the goal of communication is. Now, I can tell you architecture is working especially well for that, but that's the purpose of communication so that people can thrive into our absence.

And that is so great for us as individuals and us as leaders, because we are unleashing the beautiful potential. And the word we often refer to that in the business world is empowerment, that we can empower people, but don't empower people if you don't have good communication, or else you'll empower them to all go in different directions. Empowerment only works if we have great communication so that we're all being guided to row in the same direction as it were.

So, Frances, we identified the right problem. We've built a foundation of trust. We've increased our circle of new friends. We're ready to tell that change leadership story. Where do we go from there?

Then we have the gloriousness of going as fast as we can. So on Friday, once we've done all of that, we actually get to go fast. And there are, in the In the book, we try to show our favorite generalizable techniques of how to go fast. But I would just say, you now have no risk of breaking things. So now roll the window down, get on the open highway, and floor it.

Yeah, perfect. So we're going to move fast. We're going to fix things. But what are the trade offs you have to make to become great?

Yeah. So if I want to go fast, the number one obstacle to going fast is to try to make progress on everything. So organizations that thrive are disproportionately great at some things and disproportionately bad at others. And that's in contrast to being average at everything. I'm going to lead the witness a little bit. Do you want to have excellence or do you want to have mediocrity. That's the choice you're making. Now, the cost of excellence is that if I'm going to have positive differentiation, I have to have negative differentiation. So if I have great competitors and I'm going to overinvest in one thing, for sure, they're going to overinvest in something else. So if I'm going to be great, I'm also going to be relatively bad. And that's an emotional hurdle that you have to understand. So in order to go fast and to make progress, we have to say, what are the things we're going to optimize on? And I won't believe you unless you can be equally articulate of what does that mean or the things that you have to give up in order to do it. But if you say to the organization, here are the 12 things we want to do and do your best at doing all 12.

I call that the nobility of effort. In contrast, someone says, here are the two things that we're going to win on. And these are the things that when the competition gets better at us than these other two things, do not course correct. This is a natural cadence. That I call the nobility of excellence. You only get one of them. And too many of us are, without even realizing it, living in a world of the nobility of effort. And I would like to sprinkle magic dust and get us to join the world where there is nobility of Can you give us one example? Sure. I'll give you my favorite example. I'll give you a historical artifact because I don't think any of your listeners were alive or watching this at the time. But about 20 years ago, Steve Jobs came onto a stage carrying a Manila envelope at this Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. And he ultimately slid a laptop out of a Manila envelope. And it absolutely... Most of us were computers where you carried them with a weight belt. And this was the lightest weight laptop in the world, and we all went nuts. Well, if you interacted with Steve at the time, he was like, look, we're best in class at weight because we are worst in class at physical features.

And every other laptop had an internal CD-ROM drive. You can ask your parents what that means. Had really heavy batteries. Now, he would very readily say, We could have chosen to be disproportionately good at physical features, but then we would be disproportionately bad at weight. Those are the trade offs, because if you don't make that trade off, one team is going to work on being great at weight, the other team is going to work on being great at physical features, and you're going to end up mediocre at both. So this is why we need clarity to govern us in your absence, because in your absence, I'm going to try to be a superhero and get better at physical features, thinking in some way I'm going to please you, unless you have told me, Physical Features is not what we're going to compete on.

All right, Frances, as we wrap up here, one question that we ask everybody, what are you curious about and learning now?

I am absolutely obsessed with AI. I spend an inordinate amount of time working on it myself and advising other companies. I am a optimistic person by nature, and I like rigor and optimism. Ai, to me, is a great unleash and a great unlock. Not surprisingly, I'm seeing some companies have just adopted it in every corner of the organization. And then some companies are like, oh, we have six AI people in the company. I can tell you which one I'd bet on for the future. I just spent two days with a company who has six AI guys. And then last week, I was with a company that you can't go into a meeting where AI doesn't come up, and it's being adopted in every nook and cranny. The reason it can be adopted in every nook and cranny is you don't have to be great at code in order to use AI. You just have to be willing to think different. What am I curious about? I'm I'm ready and I marvel at what can be done with this computing power that has added zeros to the effectiveness. So it's going to unleash us in extraordinary ways.

And I can't wait to see what your listeners come up with it. I will be a lead consumer of it, and I think it's going to make the world a much better place.

Wow. Frances Frey, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

I loved every moment of it, Allen. Thank you.

Thanks again to Francis Frey for joining me today on the podcast. Follow Leading Up, a podcast from Udemy Business wherever you find your podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode to help you level up your leadership skills. Follow the show so you never miss a new episode. And if you like the show, leave a rating or a review. We love the feedback, and it really helps us to find new listeners. To learn more about Leading Up or how Udemy can help you develop leaders at scale and move business forward, visit business. Udemy. Com. The Leading Up podcast is produced in partnership with pod people. Our original theme is by Soundboard.