Boss Class 1: Weed it and reap

Hey everyone, it's Russell and Christine. So I just found this mobile game everyone's talking about. Royal Match. Gorgeous graphics and super fun puzzles.

Bro, you're late. I'm already at level 700. I play it every day on the subway because it doesn't need WI fi.

Wait, what? I've got to catch up.

Oh, and they just added new minigames. They make it even more fun and challenging.

Alright, show's over. I'm gonna go play.

Download Royal Match on the App Store or Google Play today.

The Economist.

Okay, it is the morning in Voss. We are about to head onto a bus to go into the national park and and a place called Fondsby. This past summer, I joined a trek through the Jotunheimen Mountains in Norway. The producers for this podcast had trained me on a bit of recording equipment so that I could capture scenes from the adventure. I did think I'd do some packing noises, which might come in useful later. So get ready for some zips. My companions were a class of MBA students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They were on an experiential expedition for aspiring leaders run by two professors in the business school.

So real fast, raise your hand if you needed to get something at the sports store. Okay, we've got a couple.

We made a final stop for gear before arriving in the mountains. There's a kind of, you know, nervous energy. Basically everyone has been told that they're heading into a slightly unknown environment, a potentially hostile one. So there's just a general what are we getting ourselves into? Feel to the group. Everyone is in there madly buying things. Over the next seven days, the participants would take turns guiding the group from cabin to cabin. Metal would be tested, conflict would form and resolve. And the students would learn what it took to be a leader. My name's Andrew Palmer. I'm an editor at the Economist. I write Bartleby, our weekly column on work. There's a strain of management theory that says lessons in leadership are best learned outside the office, where an unfamiliar environment can expose weaknesses and forge new strengths.

So when we're at work, the stakes are, you know, our reputation, the success of a particular project, and it can be hard for people to experiment with different approaches to leadership.

Chris Myers was one of the two course instructors. Both he and his colleague, Mike Doyle are also certified wilderness guides. Here in Norway, they were putting that in the wild theory to the test, and I had come along to see what would happen.

None of these folks are expert mountaineers. No one has ego and reputation on the line. It's A little bit of a psychologically safer space to experiment with different approaches to leadership, to how they want to function as a team.

Our first night was in Fonsbu. We'd begin our trek the next morning. The idea was for Chris and Mike to stand back and to let the students run things for themselves. And tomorrow's guinea pigs had gamely put themselves forward. Alex Schreiber and Andrea Alicon convened privately over a map to chart the next day's course.

We already know it's 14km, right. So now let's just do a quick little bit of mental math and I guess you could follow along with me.

Yes.

And I tend to monopolize conversations because I like to talk. So if I like.

Seriously, I will stop you.

Seriously, Feel free.

Like, I don't.

I don't need to give you permission. I know I don't. But yeah, tell me. Just hey, listen, let me.

Soon. With the mental maths done and a route mapped, Alex and Andrea had a plan. I had assumed that would be it, but there was one more thing to discuss. The morning pep talk.

I have two really, really good quotes. Well, actually there were three. One was a Dr. Seuss quote, because I thought the light heartedness of it would be, you know. So it's. You're off to great places. Today is your day, your mountain is waiting, so get on your way. But these ones are a lot more profound. It's not the mountain we Conquer but ourselves. By Sir Edmund Hillary. And then I like this one a lot also, but by Greg Child. Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb. Yeah, I like those two.

Those are good.

If you don't like them, we can. By all means.

Here's another. Unless you get to the next cabin, you won't have any dinner.

Is anyone not here?

The next morning, the group gathered in front of our accommodation. Overlooking a glacial lake surrounded by snow flecked mountains. Alex laid out the itinerary. A 14 kilometer hike plus elevation with a stop for lunch about halfway through. We would arrive at the next cabin after eight hours. Alex then started into what he called a moment of motivation.

At the end of the day, we're.

Going to be there.

What this is, is not a. It's not a challenge, it's not an endeavor, it's an adventure. And in the word wise words of Sir, Sir Edward something. It was a quote I found was that. No, no, no. But it's. At the end of the day, it is not the mountain. Or in our case the fjord that you conquer but yourselves.

Right.

So we're gonna go through this and the mountain is the physical obstacle, but it's not the, it's not the true obstacle we're overcoming today. You know, we're working on ourselves, we're working on our leadership and our ability to coexist in a team. And that's all I got.

During the morning, it had become clear how varied the physical capabilities of the team were. Spirits were high, but there were frequent breaks for water and the going was very slow. The students had strung out over ever longer distances. At a lunchtime feedback session, Alex was on the defensive.

So somebody needs to be in the.

Front, somebody needs to be.

Be in the back.

So, so that, that I can take. However, I was also given advice by not no names, but also that I don't necessarily have to be in the.

Front as a leader.

That it's also good to let someone else kind of like be like the trailblazer, so to speak. Look out the. Look out the front.

Ish.

The group's pacing was badly off. A lot of the terrain was over boulder fields, which meant hopping from rock to rock. There were areas of snowpack which could suddenly give way to the stones beneath. I don't know where I'm going with this thought. I'm going to actually concentrate on crossing this river. By 5:30pm roughly when the hike was meant to end, we learned from a couple of passing walkers that we still had hours to go before reaching that night's cabin. So group morale plummeted as a result. I think everyone is now aware that there's a still a relatively long period to go and it will be a long day. As the evening drew on, the students were no longer shouldering responsibility. Chris and Mike, the instructors, were now making the decisions with one aim in to reach our destination sometime this decade. So this is now turning into a leadership test for you guys, right? I mean it really, you're the ones who are up. Yeah.

Thanks for coming along and turning it.

Into a. I mean, you know, I don't think you can blame me. We finally arrived at the cabin after 13 hours. The group had been moving at a pace of around a kilometer an hour, which would have been hugely impressive if we were Galapagos Tortoises. The Norwegian volunteer who was looking after the cabin couldn't stop laughing at how long it had taken. She said our 13 hour trip should have taken us five and a half. And yet at that night's debrief, students were congratulating each other.

But My takeaway from today is like.

How capable are we?

Like, if you would have told us this morning all that stuff we'd be doing today, I would have requested to be airlifted up, but just there were.

I'm not sure capable is quite the word I'd choose. It was close to midnight. The locals were openly laughing at us, and we were supposed to do it all again tomorrow. In fact, the Norwegian mountains would have something to teach the group about how to be a good boss. But the lesson wasn't really about leadership. It was about management. Welcome to boss class from the Economist. It's a seven part series for anyone who manages people or aspires to do so. Too much management advice focuses on charisma and character. Too many business books ask what someone totally improbable would do if they were the boss. How would Attila the Hun have handled that difficult performance review? What would Gandhi have done about the snack cupboard? In this podcast series, you'll get something more valuable. Practical tips from people who actually run things. Executives, technologists and team leaders. Episode 1 Weed it and Reap. Celebrity bosses used to have nicknames that made a virtue of short fuses and brutality. Chainsaw, Owl and Neutron Jack sound more like serial killers than executives. Rising up the corporate ladder is still a Darwinian process, but firms today are after more than a type A personality. Managers also need social skills to coordinate as well as command, to persuade as well as instruct. It all makes for a ludicrously improbable mixture of traits. Be more talented than others in the firm, but don't tell them what to do. Listen charismatically. Be likably aggressive. If that doesn't sound like you or anyone else on the planet, don't worry. Good leaders have systems, not superpowers. In fact, thinking you have special talents is often where the problems start.

I'm Daniel Kahneman. I'm a professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton, and I have studied primarily judgment and decision making.

Okay, terrific. You don't really need an introduction, but that's helpful. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winner and a prolific researcher and writer on the fallibility of human judgment. Every CEO will have a copy of Thinking Fast and Slow, his most famous book. Some might even have read it. He would have recognized the source of the over optimistic forecasts made by the students in Norway. He made exactly the same mistake himself when he was at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He and his colleagues had an idea that rational judgment techniques should be taught to high school students. So they began work on a new curriculum.

And, you know, we were doing quite well. We'd worked about a year and we would meet every Friday and we'd be very pleased with ourselves. And then one Friday I had the idea of asking people, how long will it take us to, to finish the book? And everybody should do that separately, write it down on a piece of paper.

The estimates, including his own, were all in a close range at least a year and a half, but less than two and a half years. Then he asked the department's director, who'd also estimated in that range how long it generally took other teams like theirs to develop a whole new textbook.

And his first answer, he was shocked himself by the first answer. He said, you know, I realized that not all of them succeeded. About 40% of them failed altogether. Then, you know, anxiously, I asked him, and what about the others, those who did finish, how long did it take them? And he said, I can't think of anyone who took less than seven years and I can't think of anyone who persisted more than 10. So somewhere in that range, and what happened next in the project is also very typical. We just went on, we ignored, I mean, obviously we should have quit that day. We proceeded as if that incident hadn't happened and the book was completed seven.

Years later, which is roughly how long that first day in Norway felt. Daniel Kahneman has described this moment as one of the most instructive of his life. He and his colleagues at Hebrew University had succumbed to what he later called the planning fallacy. They were taking the so called inside view, basing their forecasts on their own optimistic estimates, and failing to use other similar projects, the outside view, as their point of reference. Kahneman is generally skeptical about using intuition to make big decisions. There's a sort of category of boss which would say, you know, I rely on my gut. It served me well. It's really what I'm good at. What do you say to that, that kind of person.

You know, saying that is useful for getting to the top. That is people who have confidence in their gut, if they are lucky a few times and if they're clever, then they will rise to the top and they will be absolutely convinced that it's their gut that caused the rise. And in fact, in many cases, luck has a lot to do with who gets to the top more than most people will admit. And I would say to such an individual and they would not listen to me, but if I had the chance to say something to them, I would say, you're wrong, you would be better off with a structured process. If you can adopt it.

A structured process can help avoid common flaws in human decision making. Kahneman himself developed a carefully crafted method for evaluating officer training candidates in the Israeli army. Its strength lay in slowing down snap judgements.

Intuition as a tool is much overrated. And it's overrated because subjectively, when you apply your intuition, it comes with a great sense of confidence. But it turns out that confidence is not closely related to accuracy.

The structured process can apply in many other settings too, whether you're in a cabin in Norway or the corner office of a big firm.

I remember somebody once told me that when you're a CEO, the mindset you have to have is what really difficult, intractable problems people are going to bring me today. Because by definition, it's not always positive, easy solutions if it's arriving on your desk.

Emma Walmsley is the CEO of a massive pharmaceutical company, gsk. It's a position that means she is always on show and she knows it.

The impact your title can have on other people is something to be very aware of. And you have to remember when you walk into a room, how you show up will impact other people's days. You have to remember that your raised eyebrow or if you happen to just, I don't know, pour your coffee down your T shirt before you came in.

I surreptitiously check my shirt.

If you bring that into a room, you've got to check yourself and make sure you remember that. Your job is to motivate and focus and inspire and teach and listen. Listen really hard and learn yourself.

Walmsley spent her early career at l', Oreal, where she rose through management roles around the world before moving to GSK in 2010. In 2017, she took on the top job. She definitely has presence, but she also has a process.

I think the thing that has been most useful in this journey has been to articulate literally on one page, which I keep stuck with a piece of Sellotape on my computer. I don't need it now because I know it off by heart and make many in the company do. But it's just the why, what and the how of our company and this matters. So, you know, lots of people talk about purpose and then lots of people criticise companies worrying about purpose. I do think it matters to say, what is the point of our company? Literally, what is the point of it?

GSK defines its purpose. The why as uniting science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together.

How we work together is just three things for us. We Say we want them to be ambitious for patients because that is what inspires people. That's what should drive you, the patient. Be sat in a chair in every meeting. In theory, be accountable for our impact. That's also how we impact others as managers, by the way. So sometimes being accountable for your impact as a manager or leader is get out of the way, give people the space to do their job, give them the funds, give them resources, or just leave them alone. And it's really nice to have that language in a culture thing because when you say support to succeed, it gives someone permission to say, I need your support to succeed. Could you leave me alone? And can we cancel the next three meetings?

Could you leave me alone is the thought I suppress most often.

So having that vocabulary helps. Ambitious for patients, accountable for our impact. And then lastly, do the right thing with integrity and care, because people count on us.

This one page document provides a framework, the outlines of a structured process for the difficult decisions in Emma Walmsley's day. And it gets everyone else marching in the same direction.

It's definitely a cultural document, but it's about having a shorthand internally that allows you to move a bit faster and communicate clearly.

Articulating something, writing it down gives clarity on something high level, like what an organization values and what its goals are. It can also work day to day. When people are doing something as simple as a meeting.

You've got this really simple thing that I use. It's very basic, but it's helped a lot on, you know, what is the point of this meeting? Is any agenda item for a decision or for input or for awareness? If it's just for awareness, can't you just send an email? Can we be clear on who the decision is and who the people who have to input into it are?

Do you articulate this explicitly before every meeting or is it just understood?

Yeah, I mean we literally will have on the agendas. This is really basic. But no, no, this is, this is exactly diagnosis. And even board meetings, it's like, is it for a decision, is it for input, is it for awareness? And it's got to be one of those things. And if it's a decision, whose decision is it? So I do think being really clear on ownership and accountability and explicit on it is important.

A procedure for running meetings, hiring staff, setting incentives, forming teams. It all stems from that one piece of paper stuck to her computer.

When you have that in place as a shared roadmap set, by the way, to a bunch of financial goals and operating performance targets, then you can start to cascade it into okay. Everyone can set their personal objectives around those goals.

Hi, I'm Rachna Shan Bogue, the Economist Business Affairs Editor at the Economist. We speak to bosses and the people around them to get the lowdown on the big stories and emerging trends in business and finance. But of all the things we write about, nothing captures our readers interest like Bartleby Andrew's weekly column on work in Boss class. He'll be guiding you through some of the biggest challenges facing managers today, from hiring to grappling with AI. To hear the whole series, including bonus episodes with in depth interviews with selected guests, you'll need a subscription to the Economist if you have one already. Thank you. If you listen on Apple or Spotify, you'll be able to link your podcast app to your subscription by clicking on any of the locked episodes, starting with episode three on October 30th. For information on how to access subscriber only episodes on a daily different podcast app, head to the FAQs page in the Show Notes. If you don't yet have a subscription, you can sign up for Economist Podcast Plus. It gives you unlimited access to all our shows, including Money Talks, our weekly podcast on business, as well as our specialist shows on science, China and American politics. With Economist Podcast plus, you also get a new week weekend edition of the Intelligence, our daily podcast. All this is available for just a couple of dollars a month. Register before October 31st to get half off a year long subscription. You'll find the link to sign up in the notes for this podcast or by searching online for Economist Podcast.

Hey everyone, it's Russell and Christine. So I just found this mobile game everyone's talking about. Royal Match. Gorgeous graphics and super fun puzzles.

Bro, you're late. I'm already at level 700. I play it every day on the subway because it doesn't need Wi fi.

Wait, what? I've got to catch up.

Oh, and they just added new minigames. They make it even more fun and challenging.

Alright, show's over.

I'm going to go play download Royal Match on the App Store or Google Play today.

It's worth being explicit about the value of being explicit. We can't help the cognitive flaws that make us human, but managers can mitigate them by being clear about their goals and disciplined about their processes. Bosses can also be explicit about their own preferences. As the ever inspirational Dr. Seuss once said, today you are you. That is truer than true. There's no one alive who is you. Er, than you.

I think everyone thinks. Oh My gosh, I'm a manager now and it's all about the team and I love that instinct. But if you don't know yourself, so what are your strengths? Where might you have blind spots? Where do you need help from your team members, from your manager? You really want to understand that and you want to understand it in a continuous way.

Between 2014 and 2021, Clare Hughes Johnson was the chief operating officer of a Silicon Valley payments firm called Stripe. In that time, it went from 160 employees to over 7,000. But it was at her previous employer that she got the idea of writing.

A manual of me, the Working With Claire guide. Actually, I wrote for the first time when I was at Google and I had the occasion to facilitate a panel. And one of them talked about an engineering leader who's still at Google. Urs Holzel had written a user reference manual, very engineering title to working with him. And I kind of light bulb went off for me and I thought, that's a very smart idea.

So she produced her own user manual. She called it Working with Claire.

And I wrote it in one pretty fast go. I shopped it around to some people who worked with me because of course I don't. How am I to work with? I don't know. And I got some comments and some feedback.

I solicited similar feedback from colleagues for this podcast. The Working With Andrew document is quite short. It just says don't.

So the guide is quite tactical, but it's really meant to just reduce anxiety. And I think it was also a great exercise for me in self awareness. Right. Which, you know, how do I make decisions? How do I like to be communicated to what is important for me to know and why is it important for me to know? And that became this foundational document that I've shared with everyone, actually since then who's reported to me.

Clarity is also the key to something many managers struggle with, giving difficult feedback.

Most human beings, when you put the feedback on the table, they're relieved because they're like, okay, I know I can't get the work done on time. Hopefully you can shift into problem solving mode with them. Is this the right role? Do you not have the capabilities you need to get the work done? Whatever it is, I like to use the words I'm worried drives my husband crazy. He's like, you're worried about a lot. No, but like, I'm worried.

This is a very effective technique. We're talking in our recording studio in London. At this point in our conversation, Hughes Johnson has shifted position and is looking directly at me. She says she's worried. And now suddenly, I feel pretty worried, too. What the hell did I do?

Yes, I'm worried that we're not seeing the results from your organization that you laid out in the plan three months ago, six months ago. Or I'm worried that you haven't hired for your seven open positions. What's going on? And that's opening the door. I call that opening the door. I have a concern. I'm giving you a chance to address it, and then you're gonna see where that goes. It's like a choose your own adventure book where you're like, okay, are they gonna say, yeah, I'm struggling, or we got a problem?

It should be clear by now that Clare Hughes Johnson is a fan of structure and process. She likes to talk about a firm's operating system, the blend of documents, metrics, and rhythms that provides a framework for everyone.

I think people would be surprised at how really well run companies have what I view as an annual cadence, a quarterly cadence, a monthly and even a weekly cadence of how they run, and that everybody snaps to that. And that's what keeps velocity. There's a lot of sort of this fallacy of, well, if we let 1,000 flowers, aka 1,000 smart people bloom, then somehow we'll have a field of glory. I would just argue you'll have a.

Field of weeds maintaining velocity, snapping to it. Good advice for aspiring leaders everywhere. Norway Day 2. In spite of the previous day's difficulties, spirits among the students were high. Two new leaders were running things. But some familiar problems had resurfaced. Very quickly, we found ourselves off track. I asked Mike, one of the course instructors, what had happened.

Definitely a similar pattern of not sticking to the original plan.

We're moving okay, but we've taken a lot of break. Yeah. So we've had three or four breaks in an hour.

This is our fourth break, and three.

Of them have been unplanned. Once again, if anyone asked to stop to take their bag off for a minute or to get some water, the group complied. But as the day progressed, the value of some small but important changes to process became clear. One of the strongest walkers in the group was put at the front to set the pace, but without letting everyone string out too much. And there was another innovation.

Okay, setting expectations. We're going to do a power hour. With the exception of when we run.

Across running water, we're going to refuel.

Okay.

The power hour. It was a simple mnemonic seeded by Chris and Mike the instructors and adopted by the group. We trekked non stop for an hour, only pausing for a water bottle refill if we happened across a stream. That's what the team needs. A rule, some common language, the beginnings of a system to guide the group towards its goal that turned out to be more meaningful than any pep talk. So we've been going for this is a totally different kind of day from yesterday.

Yeah, so we're at about, I would say right around eight hours now. So a little bit shorter distance, 11 kilometers versus 15 kilometers, but realistically that should only shave a couple hours off the time. And we had some pretty impressive terrain features, including coming down a fairly significant snowpack. So, you know, I think the gains are due to better functioning in the team, a little bit more consistent kind of communication from the leaders. Still seeing some gaps and things.

I won't say we did well on day two, but we did better. We reached the cabin in good time to eat and have a proper debrief. If the locals were laughing at us, they were more discreet about it. I didn't stick around to the end of the trip, but Chris and Mike messaged me later to report that the team had continued to improve. The days got easier. The students found a cadence. Two weeks later, the MBA class debriefed over Zoom.

All right, welcome everybody. Glad to get to see everyone at least virtually once more.

After the course, Chris Myers went around the room asking for reflections and came to Alex, one of the leaders on day one.

Reflecting on that first day, I didn't do a good job of getting on the balcony, feeling out the room, analyzing it from a like a third party perspective almost, you know what I mean? And then feeling out the room and seeing how things were working without necessarily me being the center point of it all. And that's something that is going to be interesting to reconcile going forward because, you know, as a leader, a lot of times you are in the center of focus, right? But getting on the balcony kind of implies that you take a step back and like, you can't be in the action.

Alex was right. Being the boss is partly about visibility and charisma. A good leader is someone who people want to work for. Enthusiasm and energy are a vital part of the formula, and all the students were genuinely impressive on this score. But leadership is less about Marvel characters and more about management, pulling out weeds and putting in a process so that problems get solved even if you aren't there. In the rest of this series, I'll look at some of the most common problems managers face, from hiring the right people to running a good meeting, from motivating staff to making teams sing. And no issue is thornier right now than whether workers should be back in the office. I completely understand why someone doesn't want to commute an hour and a half every day. Doesn't mean they have to have a job here either. That's Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, on the next episode of BossClass. It's available now from wherever you're listening to this episode. To hear all seven episodes, you'll need a subscription to the Economist if you have one already. Thank you. If you don't, you can sign up for our new podcast subscription, Economist Podcasts plus Google Economist Podcasts for more information, including how to link your account if you're already a subscriber, and how to get the best offer if you're not. The producers of Boss Class are Sam Colbert, Lawrence Knight, Pete Norton, and Sandra Shmueli, with help from Daniela Raz. Our sound designer is Weidong Lin with original music by Darren Ng. The series editor is Claire Reed and John Shields is our Executive producer. I'm Andrew Palmer. This is the Economist.

Ever find yourself bored or trying to kill time? We have finally found a solution for you. Royal Match don't believe me? Let's hear what people say. Royal Match is such a fun puzzle game. There are over 10,000 levels. Also a bunch of mini games which makes it super exciting.

My favorite part?

It doesn't need wi fi.

I play on my computer, commute on.

Flights even while waiting in line.

And honestly, no ads. Not a single one. That's why I'm so into it.

So there you have it. A relaxing, challenging, totally ad free game that goes wherever you go. Download Royal Match and see why everyone loves it.