Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

You can find Andrew’s Boss Class (and other podcasts from The Economist) at  http://bit.ly/3HR1ATy.

Andrew’s Bartleby column is online at https://www.economist.com/topics/bartleby.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– From Ego to Impact with New Rhein’s Subhanu Saxena

– The White House Lessons for Every Leader with Presidential Advisor Betsy Myers

– Hilton’s Pillars for Thriving After Disaster with Hampton Inns & Spark SVP Shruti Gandhi Buckley

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Andrew Palmer writes the Bartleby column on the workplace and is the host of “Boss Class,” The Economist‘s limited-season podcast on management. He was formerly Britain editor, executive editor, business-affairs editor, head of the data team, Americas editor, finance editor and banking correspondent, having joined The Economist as management correspondent in February 2007.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us on this mission today is Andrew Palmer. Andrew writes the Bartleby column at The Economist. Additionally, he’s the host of the Podcast Boss Class, which is currently in its second season.

We’ll be talking about what makes a good boss and why the secrets of management can be learned. Andrew, welcome.

Andrew: Thank you very much for having me, Maureen. I.

Maureen: Let’s start with what is Boss

Andrew: class? So Boss Class is a podcast which tries to help people to be a better manager, and the premise of it is that very many people go into management, not because they want to, but because it’s the way to get promoted, not because they’re good at it.

In fact, they may be good at something else entirely and that they don’t get much help. So, I dunno what the equivalent figure is in the US but in the UK here, four outta five [00:01:00] managers who go into management don’t get any formal training. So it’s trying to address that need a kind of pool of people who are managing others don’t quite know what they’re doing and should be given some help ’cause it really matters.

Maureen: The stats I’ve seen here are on average people are in supervisory or leadership roles for over 10 years before they get any training.

Andrew: That sounds about right. Depressingly familiar

Maureen: and has an adverse impact on businesses.

Andrew: So there’s a really nice study that was done in America actually, of, I think it was salespeople, and it looked at how people who moved up the chain into management tended to be people who are much better salespeople and tended to have a disproportionately worse impact on their new subordinates.

So it was absolutely not a predictor of being a good manager, being a good salesperson. Nonetheless, it was what led them into positions of responsibility.

Maureen: And the opportunity cost of then you lose your best salesperson and you have a mediocre manager in, in some cases bad.

Andrew: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think we, we all [00:02:00] sort of know this empirically, that being managed by a terrible manager isn’t unpleasant, has bad effects, but the data also show that up.

Even at GDP level, it looks like quality of management really matters to growth rates. So America must be doing something right relative to Britain and other places, but if you do get it right, it has this big economy wide effect.

Maureen: And I would say leadership and structure. I. Because if we look at how our economy is structured, all of the pieces that influence democracy and capitalism have an outcome.

Socialism has an outcome, so leadership and structure go hand in hand in producing a good outcome.

Andrew: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, at the level of the organization, if you are well managed, that’s good for their organization at the level of the individual, whether you are the boss. ’cause it’s nice to know what you’re doing or the person reporting into them, being competent, having the right tools matters and then you ladder that up as you say.

And that has a macro effect as [00:03:00] well.

Maureen: Let’s jump into Boss class. What were the big takeaways from season one that you want our listeners to hear as the foundation for talking about season two?

Andrew: I think one of the things that came through to me was the degree of self-awareness that leaders have. So you kind of associate people who get to the top of the tree with a sort of narcissistic, self-centered way of approaching things.

And the best people we spoke to in the last season were really, really thoughtful about how they were coming across. And I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed Claire Hughes Johnson. Who’s an ex Stripe executive, but if you haven’t, I’d really recommend her. She’s fantastically good, and I think probably my favorite story from last season was just her practice of writing a manual of herself.

It was called Working with Claire. It involved her. Basically describing her working practices, what she liked to do, how did she like to take decisions, how [00:04:00] did she like data to be given to her? How quick would she be to respond to people if they sent her an email and she put this document together, sent it round to some peers who then sort of sense checked it and said, you know, this is roughly right.

1. And ever since then has used that for every new report, and it is basically a guide to how she manages as well as a kind of a sort of self-awareness tool, which helps everyone to coalesce around the way of working. I thought that was a really nice example of how, you know, the best bosses think about how they work and how they interact with other people.

Maureen: And give a guide. How often have you interacted with someone? We make jokes about it. Who has the decoder ring? For this colleague?

Andrew: Yeah, exactly right. So just that process of writing things down, like how do I like to work, forces you to confront yourself with your own practices. There’s another example.

The boss of Verizon, Henrik Vestberg, keeps a little diary of his energy levels. He keeps it every day. Mm. And basically it’s a sort of [00:05:00] ongoing kind of thermometer reading. So basically what he does, I think he does it in the morning, so he actually, it’s backward looking, but it enables him to just sort of tune himself over time.

So. He gives himself a rating on his energy levels. If it’s like less than two, he shouldn’t have got outta bed. He should have basically just stayed at home. If it’s more than seven, he’s been unbelievably irritating. He’s too bouncy around people, and there’s some sort of sweet zone in the middle, which is like when he’s both motivating.

And not irritating over time. He says that this has trained him to sort of know what kind of mood he’s in at any one point and where he should be. Should he be in the office? Should it be out meeting customers? Should he be with staff? It’s a bit gi key, but interesting way of kind of just interrogating yourself and that inward looking way of sort of like, how am I coming across?

Is it sort of interesting and probably not that focused on element of leadership.

Maureen: There’s a consulting stream that looks at people managing their energy, but I’ve not [00:06:00] heard it used in the way you’re using it.

Andrew: I think he came up with this himself. It was just a, just his own practice. I don’t think it’s a formal device in any way.

I just think it could be applied in any number of ways. What drains you of energy? What gives you energy? Just thinking about your day, your week, your month. When do you show up at your best for the people that you’re working with? And you’re talking about more than caffeine. As giving energy? Well, I mean, caffeine is just a baseline, right?

So, yeah. But caffeine is definitely important. But I guess that for this guy, it was just a, clearly, he’s super energetic, so there’s a point at which that’s problematic. It’s just like, for God’s sake, calm down. Is, is the reaction that you, that you have to him. But he knows that and tries to manage it.

Maureen: The thread I hear though is self-awareness.

In both instances there’s a how do I work with myself, but also how do other people work with me? Not just self-management, but being potentially transparent in I’m asking for feedback.

Andrew: Yes. [00:07:00] Now, I don’t know that. Lots of bosses are great at that. That’s sort of ideal, like asking for feedback. That’s what you want, and people will often subscribe to the gospel of feedback and psychological safety and so on, and not necessarily live it In practice.

It’s probably a bit self-selecting. The best people will be thinking about this already and acting on it in quite deliberate ways, and then other people will be sort of paying lip service to it and not behaving in quite the right way.

Maureen: Giving feedback as you say that I think of a former client who allegedly had kind of an open door policy and he encouraged people to come in and talk to him.

I was his living on site, but consultant, and he would come into my office and say, why does that guy work here? He doesn’t have very good judgment, and I’m thinking you can’t encourage fairly junior people to come in and talk to you at the C level and then criticize their judgment. It is. Kind of contrary to what you’re asking, and for them [00:08:00] career limiting in part, don’t open your door because you’re now firing people.

Yeah,

Andrew: totally. Right. It’s, it is the same idea around, um, empowerment, right? I mean, people will talk a good game on delegating authority and enabling people to take decisions. And then what happens when they take a decision you disagree with? That’s where it falls down for a lot of a lot of people. One of the most interesting interviews we did in this season was with the boss of a mobile games company called Supercell.

When you’re not writing your textbooks, I’m sure you’re on your phone playing this Clash of Clans heyday. Supercell makes these games really, really successful. I. The guy who runs it is called Ilka Nan, very sort of nice open fin up in in Helsinki, and he used to run a games company and noticed that the games which did best were the ones that he had had least to do with.

So he’d set up this whole sort of bureaucracy around decision making and sort of stage gates for getting games out in the market. And then he [00:09:00] looked at, at the end of the year, which games had done best. It was the ones that he’d really ignored. He took from that the lesson that the sort of process of.

Bosses interfering. Meddling from the top down was absolutely the wrong way to go about it. So Supercell, this beer moth that he founded is built on an entirely different set of principles where it’s a kind of very, very radical autonomy where the games teams, the programmers creating games basically can make.

All of the decisions for themselves, including the ability to kill a game before it’s been released. So they could spend years on a title and then decide, okay, this is just not gonna work and we’re gonna kill it. There’s a point at which the senior leadership team there will, will get involved, but only once it’s gone out to the public.

So there’s a sort of real radical autonomy. I remember we went there and there was actually a games team, which had decided to move out of the main office in Helsinki and. Pannanen, the CEO didn’t have a key, so he knew where they [00:10:00] were, but he couldn’t get in. So that was a very radical kind of way of running the company, and he definitely lived it.

But it’s strikingly unusual for someone to kind of say, yeah, I really like autonomy and actually embrace it in that way. I.

Maureen: I hear people will take something like that and go off and run with it, but they haven’t hired people who are able to function autonomously. The measures aren’t there. The culture doesn’t support it.

As I listen to you, I hear he put the whole system in place that allows that to be successful.

Andrew: Yeah. It was a very much founding, the sort of founding principle of the company and it is a creative company, so you know, the quality of the games determines its success, so it, it’s. Quite specific to an industry.

I’m not saying it would work everywhere. It’s just interesting to see an example like that work. I think in, in other circumstances, maybe the way to think about it is less that very radical organizational approach, but more thinking through quite deliberately what decisions you can delegate [00:11:00] and sort of let people run with and what are the ones that you actually absolutely have to be involved with.

We had a good conversation with Michelle Goss, who’s the CEO of Levi’s about this, you know, what are the types of decisions where you basically let people run? Because the consequences, even if things go badly, are not that great. And what are the ones where you’ve absolutely got to be running it yourself and sometimes the only person making the decision.

So her example, are you a lover of the pumpkin spice latte? I’m calorie conscious, so I drink black coffee. Okay. Alright. To my shame, I’ve never had a pumpkin spice latte, so I mean, it’s not really a big, maybe it is a big thing here, but it sounds terrible to me, but it’s really, it’s really, really popular there.

Right? It is. It is a big mm-hmm. Big thing. Yeah, it is a big thing. And she was part of the Starbucks team that launched it. Apparently in all of its kind of focus group history. People were kinda like, this sounds awful. Eating a pumpkin in my coffee. Well, that’s disgusting. I don’t want anything to do with that.

But they took the view [00:12:00] that, alright, what’s the worst that could happen? And launched it and now it’s, you know, changed the face of humanity in some way. I don’t understand. But anyway, it’s, it’s, it’s a real success. And she takes from that. Some things will go wrong, but just not that badly wrong. It’s really refreshing to hear a boss say that sort of thing.

You know, sometimes the consequences are just not that bad. So we can afford to suck up a mistake.

Maureen: And that again speaks to putting parameters on the size of bets, understanding the risk you can take, and we talk about leadership in this context, the current era as requiring the mind of the scientist that I need to have the ability to do experiments and as long as we’re directionally correct, continuing to move forward.

I

Andrew: think that’s right. It’s sort of very difficult to manage and specify mix of kind of data and process and instinct and risk [00:13:00] appetite, and also I suppose. Direction. So I think innovation is in your title of the podcast. You know, talking to people at Google and at Corning, which is this very big materials firm, which makes the glass in smartphones.

The way that they talked about this was interestingly warning against trying to time. The market, you just can’t do it. And often things which have failed in the past suddenly become useful because the tech has caught up or consumers have caught up or whatever it is. So their way of thinking about this, Corning is a really interesting example.

They think in terms of vectors, so they know that it is useful to make glass stronger. They know that it is useful to make glass more light absorbent. They know that it is useful to make fiber optic cabling denser. So in their language, that’s a vector. You just keep going in that direction. At some point, it’s likely to pay off because that’s a property which is useful and the market will catch up to it even if you don’t quite know when.

Maureen: [00:14:00] So doing what you and I do, making bosses and leaders better. We, we hope the market catches up. We hope there is, we’re

Andrew: on the right vector. That’s, that’s the only thing that we can say.

Maureen: Actually, as you say that, and I’m looking at the screen, Google glasses. One could argue weren’t as successful as projected.

I’m now wearing meta glasses. I’ve never

Andrew: tried them. So what are you using them to do? Right now

Maureen: they have a Bluetooth built in. It’s the bone conducting Bluetooth. Mm-hmm. So if I were talking to you on the phone, I wouldn’t have earbuds in. It would just be the glasses. And the other is I can push a button and it takes a picture, or I can push a button and it takes a video and un.

Fortunately, I’m not yet perfect at this, so when I’m cleaning my glasses, I end up videoing my feet. There is also the video of something I’m trying to capture as I’m walking through the world, and I don’t now have to do it through my phone. [00:15:00]

Andrew: Sounds amazing. Well, I look forward to all those viral videos of your feet

Maureen: sweeping the internet.

Andrew: Um, but you are right that technology, the ar vr stuff, which everyone was very kind of excited about a few years ago, it will eventually find its place. And Google’s, we talked to Liz Reed, who’s the head of search at Google, who gave a kind of slightly backward example, but an interesting one, which was, you know, when you search for a restaurant on Google, you get all these tons of reviews, right?

And photos, et cetera, which are user generated content. And they tried for ages to try and make that work, and they just couldn’t. And it was only the arrival of notifications and location awareness tracking on the phone that made that possible because you could know that someone was in a restaurant and you could ping them immediately and it wasn’t a hassle for them to do the review.

But without those two components, that idea of getting people to review a restaurant or, or a shop or whatever it was, that just wasn’t possible. So again, it’s like things need to be. Aligned for that to work. And I guess your [00:16:00] AI glasses are a good example of that

Maureen: for me. They are. For a lot of people.

Probably not. For some people, they’re also creepy. The idea that I could be taking a picture of you,

Andrew: but presumably if everyone is wearing them, you just are, start to assume you are constantly being surveilled.

Maureen: Yeah. It does for a lot of people. Raise the ethical question, me included. I don’t wanna be surveilled.

You need to take them off, then you’ve gotta put them in the bin. Actually, I turn them off most of the time. I don’t love that my conversations could be recorded.

Andrew: Well, I guess the interesting bit is how that applies in the office. So there’s definitely a big ethical question if you’re just out on the street.

What rights a boss or a company has to surveil employees when you are kind of in the place of work? I’m sure there will be legal answers to that, which I’m not. I’m just not across. I think you are giving some kind of permission in a way you’re not on the street.

Maureen: Actually, a colleague of mine was involved in a startup that consolidates internal communications from [00:17:00] employees, so the Slack, the teams streams that are company sponsored.

So our. Teams chats. They offered a service that monitored those, looked at employee sentiment, but also flagged anything that looked troublesome. Otherwise, it was just the AI monitoring. An example is someone was conspiring to commit murder on their internal chat system, so that obviously gets flagged and action is taken.

Why they thought it was a good idea to do that on teams. I am unsure.

Andrew: That’s amazing. Our Slack channels are not that interesting. I have to say. We’ve gotta up up our game.

Maureen: Well, you, you think they’re not that interesting, but the private conversations could Well,

Andrew: that’s true.

Maureen: Yeah. And that’s actually a true story.

So it is interesting the line between and the balance between security and privacy.

Andrew: Yeah. Really hard one to draw. I’m reminded we had a conversation with a French [00:18:00] AI startup called Photo Room. They’re not actually in the podcast in the end, but it’s basically a kind of AI enabling you to edit change photos.

Young, very successful European startup here, and they ban any dms or direct messaging within the firm. So their whole thing is, again, a kind of radical transparency idea. Basically everything should be open. There should be no private communication at all, and that way everyone knows exactly what everyone is working on, and all questions are easily answered with a search function.

I’m not sure how welcome that would be to a lot of people, but it’s an interesting way of forming a culture. I.

Maureen: It is curious to hear how different organizations do things. Even our small organization, we have the opposite. Don’t send me a hundred messages that don’t pertain to me. ’cause then I spend all my time reading all these messages that aren’t of value to the work I’m trying to accomplish.

Andrew: One of our episodes, the last episode that’s coming out is on culture [00:19:00] and this kind of very amorphous quality to organizations that really, really matters. I mean, as you say, right? They, it differs massively between places. Your employer will have a totally different culture to arrivals or to the economists, and so we tried to kind of get inside a couple of places which really think about this, and not particularly to answer the question.

Which is the best culture? ’cause that’s not the right question. It will suit different companies and different people. But how to think about creating and spreading a culture was what we were trying to get at. There was a really nice diagnostic idea from a, an academic at MIT called Donald. So, which is that you can tell a company which thinks hard about culture by looking at the ratio between the number of values, which needs to be sort of small.

You don’t have a long laundry list of abstract nouns. And then the number of, I’m gonna say levers. You guys say levers, things that you pull,

Maureen: not people who are exiting.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. [00:20:00] Uh, I’m definitely saying it right, Maureen, just to be clear. Um, and I know you are. Yeah. Right. Um, so those are the things that you can basically pull at the top of an organization or throughout an organization to amplify and project those values.

And so we went to a couple of places. One you may. Well known Stryker medical equipment firm, which is based in Michigan, Kalamazoo. They’re really good at spreading a culture. So they’re basically, they’re very high performance, high humility is how they describe their culture. But the interesting thing is just how many levers they pull.

So. You know the obvious things like a mission statement, but organizationally, they like the idea of being the underdog. So if a division gets really big, they split it up and then you’ve gotta start growing again. You’re no longer the leader in the sector, so that’s important to them. All of their hiring is driven around this idea of what kind of person do we want?

They use Clifton’s strengths. That’s the language that they use within the organization to sort of spread a particular. Culture so [00:21:00] everyone knows their five top strengths. The boss, Kevin Lobo, could just sort of recite them immediately. They’re pinned on people’s cubicles wherever you go in the world, if you, if you are in Stryker, and there are numerous other examples of how they do this, but it was very, very deliberate, very intentional.

There are lots of ways in which we can spread a culture and we are going to use every single one of them. I can give you one more if you’re of interest, which is the Toyota factory, which is sort of a mythical place, right? Lean manufacturing, the sort of the heartland of it. But if you go, it’s just fascinating to see that culture brought to life.

The idea of continuous improvement, the idea of managers sort of walking the plant and seeing how that works in practice is amazing. So I went to a factory in the center of England and it felt like walking into a little bit of Japan, sort of people sort of using the language of Toyota, using snatches of Japanese.

Pulling the famous and on cord, which they use to identify problems and make suggestions. So when you go into a place [00:22:00] and you see that culture sort of pouring off people and processes, it’s really, really distinctive and interesting. I.

Maureen: I love the Toyota example. We interviewed the person at Koch Industries responsible for defining the principles in managing that part of the culture.

And to your point, there are eight principles and it is principle over process. So we don’t have strict rules about how things are executed. But rather global enterprise, lots of different industries. I can’t give you a formula for how to execute something in a manufacturing plant that will also work in a leadership team as an example.

So they’ve got principles like humility and integrity that everyone is expected to implement no matter what their seat in the enterprise. We’ve, I think, all interacted with folks who have stuff on a wall that doesn’t genuinely permeate and drive the culture. [00:23:00]

Andrew: Completely agree. It’s so generic, some of the language about this, right?

In integrity. I mean that’s, that’s such a classic one collaboration. I’m sure we could just do the sort of values bingo and come up with these words, but when you see it being lived, it’s really obvious. So the Toyota one is Kaizen. Continuous improvement and they turn that from an idea into practicality by, you know, there’s a requirement for people in the factory to be coming up with two ideas to improve the process within the factory.

So that ladders up to thousands in, in a month. I. And that might be very, very small. It might be the location of a tiny pot of tools at a workstation, they just accumulate these small improvements all of the time. The Andon cord is this thing that you pull if you’ve got a problem. I remember on the tour someone asking, how many times do you think this cord is pulled?

In a day, you know, there was a 16 hour shift, two eight hour shifts, and it was two and a half thousand people. But I kind of assumed pulling a cord to [00:24:00] signal that you’ve got a problem or you can’t do something that might be quite uncomfortable for people. So I hazarded a guess of 20 and the answer came back 14,000.

People are just kind of living this in a way that feels very, very odd and immediately authentic. If you are coming at it with a sort of degree of skepticism about values and writing on the wall

Maureen: that is curious. Just to recap, then culture is created through this sense of clarity of who we are and what we stand for, versus almost accidental.

It just happens. It’s hard for a culture to really reinforce what we want when it’s accidental.

Andrew: Yeah, I think that’s right. So defining it, being very clear about who you are, why you are the way that you are, but then that the other bit of this is being able to articulate. All the ways in which you then bring those values to life.

That’s organizational hiring, performance [00:25:00] promotion, the setup of a factory. In Toyota’s case, it’s both the authenticity of the culture as you lay it out, but it’s also how you bring it to life. I’ll give you one more example, if I may, which is Novo Nordisk, which is the company that makes, uh, wegovy and Ozempic the weight loss jabs.

They have a process called facilitations. And facilitations is in effect, a kind of cultural audit where they have people who are full-time or almost full-time employees who basically go around the world and they embed themselves in divisions and they interview people there, both the bosses and people lower down the chain to see whether their culture is actually being lived.

And if there are any gaps between what is written down and what is actually happening, and then those facilitators come back and talk to all of the senior leadership people in, in Copenhagen, including the the CEO and report back on, is it happening? Is it really alive? Is our culture really [00:26:00] alive in places which are out of sight?

So that’s again, quite an unusual way of, of thinking about a culture, but it’s another lever

Maureen: as we talk about the levers. That’s good.

Andrew: Reverse takeover.

Maureen: The combination of culture and systems. So you talk about radical transparency, drives a certain culture, frankly, probably attracts a certain kind of person and in that context there are other things.

Thinking like which technology we would use, how people would interact with one another, what output they’re trying to produce. Maybe more creative than another environment that’s more process focused.

Andrew: Yeah, that sounds right to me. That sounds right. I mean, radical transparency, by the way. I would, I’m not sure I would like that at all, and I suspect lots of people wouldn’t like that.

But for a young startup, which is trying to avoid bureaucracy and factionalism. That kind of starting point and that decision makes a bit more sense. I dunno quite how you’d make [00:27:00] that happen in a big multinational.

Maureen: No, Dante comes to mind as ever to the point. It is the entire system and how it operates.

So to me, system is behavior, culture, mindset, and technology and output, and the way buildings are structured, all of that has to be aligned. I can’t just pick radical transparency and drop it in Toyota.

Andrew: Totally. Right? Yeah. I mean, that would be completely inauthentic. Toyota is interesting as well ’cause they have a phrase right to digitize.

Uh, to your point about technology, they clearly view the spread of information technologies with some kind of suspicion. I mean, it’s a high tech firm in many ways, but a manager’s job is to get out onto the plant floor and see what’s happening and help solve problems where they exist. If you are able to see what’s going on in a plant by sitting at your desk and having data come to you, your incentives to leave your desk go down.[00:28:00]

So they have this very striking phrase. I mean, I sort of like, what did you say when, when they first said it, write to digitize. It’s a lot of paper-based stuff in their factories. Lots of notice boards and posters, which are designed to have, you know, people cluster around them. There is a congregational effect to this, and there’s definitely a kind of a pull onto the plant floor from not having everything come to an iPad or a, or a desktop or a laptop.

Maureen: The structure also creates the culture, so right to digitize creates a culture of going out on the floor.

Andrew: Yeah. Everything reinforces itself. In that instance, I don’t know which came first. It’s, again, it’s that idea that everything is aligned, everything is intentional. Culture is taken extremely seriously, and that’s one way of telling that they really thought about this.

Maureen: All of these elements are purposeful and aligned, and companies we’re not talking about, they’re not iconic, which is most may not be that purposeful or [00:29:00] aligned and creating the results they intend to create.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, they will have a culture, but it will be accidental to use your word, right. I mean, it will just, it will be organic.

It may well be very strong, but it might not be the one you want,

Maureen: which is the problem. What surprised

Andrew: you most in season two? Uh, so I would pick a couple of things. One was an emotional reaction that I had. I mean, I’m British, so I don’t have emotional reactions as you know, but this was, I went to Lego in bi, which is their headquarters in Denmark, and they, uh, showed me a, a room called the Vault.

The Vault has, it’s like imagine a very big hangar, like space shelves sort of. Along the width of the room and up to the height of a high ceiling, and it’s all organized chronologically, and it’s basically every single Lego set they’ve put out since the late 1950s. Going into that place, I had this incredible urge to go and find [00:30:00] my decade when I would’ve been happily playing with my Lego set, and they were talking about how people routinely would go into this room and start weeping.

Lego is very odd in a way because it does elicit that kind of emotion and you know you’re not going to get that from, I don’t know, a firm that makes microphones say since I’m staring at one, but that goodwill, that sense of emotion that a company can sum up took me by surprise. I’m not sure how one turns that into a leadership lesson, but it definitely was a moment for me which kind of drove home the how strong those bonds between consumers and companies can be if you get it right.

And then the other is I spent an excruciating day being taught how to present. One of the episodes is on public speaking, how to give up good presentation, something I don’t enjoy. And so we spent the day with Rado, which is a big. Acting school here with someone who’d graduated from there and was giving, giving techniques.

And that was just incredibly useful to [00:31:00] spend time with people who definitely know how to communicate and move an audience and to get some tips on how to do that. So it, like, it was, it was maybe three hours. It, it’s stuck in a way that training doesn’t always. That was also another nice moment.

Maureen: And yet you refer to it as excruciating.

Andrew: Well, basically the idea is you go into this room and you are there with your coach, and it’s supposed to be a safe space, but my safe space had a podcast producer and two colleagues from the films team witnessing this smirking in the sidelines. So it was a slightly different experience, but despite that, it was really useful.

I’ll tell you one. Have you heard of Finger Walking? No. Okay. So are you an umer or an er? Do you use that kind of verbal filler when you are reaching for the end of a sentence?

Maureen: So I used to say, um, and my dad listened to my first podcast and counted the number of ums and I think it was 47 in the first 10 minutes.

So I’ve really worked hard to eradicate the [00:32:00] um,

Andrew: okay. Amazing. If you don’t have your dad listening and giving feedback, this is an alternative. So this came from a, an actor turned coach called Michael Chad Hepner, who says that as you are completing your sentence, you should be walking your fingers. I’m doing it now across the desk.

And you should basically only take a step when you know what you’re going to say. And a step could be a word or it could be a point. But you allow yourself to be silent until you know exactly how you’re going to end the sentence. And it’s a very effective little technique because once you start using that, you definitely slow up and you become more comfortable with the idea of waiting and ums disappear.

You have to practice it and eventually you, you won’t be actually visibly walking your finger across the desk as a little technique for avoiding ums and uhs. I thought that was rather good.

Maureen: Interesting. And I, I have been watching you and I did not see your fingers going across the desk while you were speaking.

Andrew: Okay. [00:33:00] So if you’ve got the camera in the right place, then you can finger walk just as a little discipline. It’s quite nice. I may try that on our next podcast. Well, it sounds like your dad has cured you so you don’t need it. But for people who definitely do the meandering and the the albums and the S, it’s a good tip.

Maureen: Andrew, thank you so much for sharing the brilliant lessons and conversations you’ve had with Boss Class. I realize it’s hard to summarize everything you’ve done in hours of programming, but is there a takeaway or two takeaways you want our listeners to have other than they must engage with your podcast?

Andrew: You took the words outta my mouth, so yeah, my, my main takeaway is you must subscribe to The Economist and listen to this wonderful piece of work. But if I was going to summarize it, I think it would be to return to the beginning of the conversation. That it is possible to learn how to be a good boss, that you can be dumped in a situation where you’ve got tons of reports.

You [00:34:00] dunno what you’re supposed to do, but it is possible to take lessons from people who’ve been there and done it, and that with a bit of intentionality, a bit of reflection, and a subscription to the Economist. All of your problems will be solved.

Maureen: Brilliant. Having looked at the topics and some of your content and tying that back to most people are promoted at least a decade before they get the education, it has become incumbent upon the new leader to also take ownership of their career where their company is not.

Having subscribed to The Economist since college, the content of The Economist also is game changing for helping us build business acumen and just understanding the current challenges we’re facing.

Andrew: We didn’t rehearse this. This is brilliant. Thank you, Maureen. That’s really, really, really nice to hear.

Couldn’t agree more.

Maureen: I, I was an economics major, so this has been a thread through my life, so thank you.

Andrew: Uh, no, no, it’s a, [00:35:00] it’s a pleasure. Well, it was great to talk to you and I look forward to listening to you in future.

Maureen: Thank you. And how would someone find out more about your column and BOS class?

Andrew: Best thing to do is you can search for Boss class on any podcast platform, and it will come up to subscribe just to our podcasts.

You can search for something called Economist Podcasts Plus, which is impossible to say, but easy to Google, and that will give you all the information you need.

Maureen: Thank you so much, and to our listeners. Thank you for engaging in the podcast. If you’re interested in elevating the quality of your leadership, the Innovative Leadership Institute offers best in class leadership development, executive advising, and organizational transformation services.

You can always send me a note at inquiries@innovativeleadership.com, where the world’s most successful leaders are created.