Leading People
Gerry Murray talks to leading people about leading people. Get insights and tips from thought leaders about how to bring out the best in yourself and others.
Leading People
Discover the Leadership Secrets of World-Class Bosses
What separates exceptional leaders from mediocre managers?
This week's guest, Andrew Palmer, Senior Editor at The Economist and host of the Boss Class podcast, has spent years interviewing some of the world's most influential executives to answer this question.
Drawing from his extensive experience writing the witty and insightful Bartleby column and developing the Boss Class podcast series, Andrew reveals that great leadership isn't only about charisma or authority - it's about mastering the art of balance.
During our conversation, Andrew unpacks four critical leadership dimensions that emerged from his research.
First, effective leaders act as amplifiers of culture and strategy, using systematic approaches to project their vision throughout an organisation. Companies like Stryker implement this through deliberate hiring practices, organisational structures, and shared language, while Levi's CEO Michelle Gass creates tangible symbols to reinforce strategic priorities.
Second, self-management distinguishes exceptional leaders. Andrew shares a valuable insight from his presentation training with RADA: "turn selfie view off"— focus on your audience rather than yourself. GSK's Emma Walmsley consciously manages her emotions, knowing they impact everyone around her, while other executives create explicit "user manuals" detailing their working preferences.
Third, Andrew demystifies negotiation and decision-making. From the diamond district in New York to diplomatic negotiations with Iran, successful negotiators focus heavily on preparation and relationship-building before formal discussions begin. For decision-making, distinguishing between "one-way doors" (irreversible choices) and "two-way doors" (easily changed decisions) helps calibrate appropriate decision speeds.
Finally, Andrew draws fascinating parallels between jazz improvisation and crisis management, showing how thorough preparation enables creative responses to unexpected challenges. When facing novel situations, leaders succeed by empowering frontline employees to respond based on shared principles rather than rigid protocols.
Whether you're a seasoned executive or newly promoted manager, this conversation offers invaluable insights into practical leadership challenges.
Andrew's thoughtful analysis, delivered with characteristic wit, illuminates why management remains difficult even for those at the top—and he provides concrete strategies for improvement.
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Welcome to Leading People with me, Gerry Marais. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others.
Speaker 2:Every other week I sit down with leading authors, researchers and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights and tools that drive personal and organizational success, and in between I bring you one simple thing short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use.
Speaker 1:Whether you're here for useful tools or thought-provoking ideas, Leading People is your guide to better leadership.
Speaker 2:What can you learn about leadership from the world's best and worst bosses? Why do managers struggle with delegation, self-management and culture building even at the top, and how do we fix it? To answer these questions and many more, this week, I'm joined by Andrew Palmer, senior Editor at the Economist, long-time writer of the Witty Bartleby column and host of the Boss Class podcast. Andrew has spent years interviewing some of the world's most high-profile leaders and trying to make sense of why management is still so difficult. In this conversation, we explore what he's learned from the second season of Boss Class, diving into four big leadership themes Culture and strategy, self-management, feedback and the art of letting go. It's a thoughtful and often humorous take on what really makes a good boss, so let's dive right in.
Speaker 2:Andrew Palmer, welcome to Leading People. Thanks for having me, gerry. So now you're a longstanding voice at the Economist magazine and for me, you're known for the witty and wise Bartleby column, of which I'm a huge fan, and since, I think, 2023, you're the host of Boss Class, which is a podcast that's all about the realities of modern management. However, before we dive into your work and, in particular, the Boss Class series, let's help my listeners get to know you a little bit better. And how did you get into journalism and the Economist and then come to focus your writing and podcasting on the world of leadership and management? And were there any people, moments like epiphany moments or special assignments along the way that shaped your interest in these topics and got you to where you are today?
Speaker 3:Well, you use the word longstanding right at the the outset, which is code for old. So I've been at the economist for uh, well, must be getting on for 25 years now, possibly even more. Uh, so I've I've cycled through multiple jobs in that time. We have two bits to the economist group. There's a bit called the eiu, which is business to, and then there's the magazine that everyone knows and hopefully loves. So I've been at the magazine since 2007,.
Speaker 3:Been in multiple different roles in that time, writing about everything from banks to Latin America, editing and writing. The path to management is a kind of sort of meandering one. The way that we operate here is that people tend to move jobs quite regularly. They develop an expertise but then can move off. We're sort of all magpies in our mindset. So management was sort of always going to at some point be in my future, I suspect. But the reason that I got interested in it particularly is that it is a kind of universal experience with our subscribers. So almost everyone who reads us will have worked in an office or does so now, and the sort of frustrations, the aspirations, the experiences are common and it's a very, very rich vein, therefore, for a column. It's both entertaining, emotionally fraught and very important, and all of those things together are very, very rich for a writer. So what I'm trying to do in this is do something which is helpful, I hope, has some practical usefulness but also is vaguely entertaining.
Speaker 2:So have people stopped inviting you to meetings at the Economist after all these observations?
Speaker 3:So there's always a kind of moment after a column comes out when someone will come into the office and look at me in a kind of worried way and say was that about me? I have to deny it, but of course it was. So, yes, it's basically trolling people. Yes.
Speaker 2:Professionally. That's what. If you get work like that, why not take it? You know Well, exactly, yeah, and you are. Before we get into boss class. You are famous for something to do with a lettuce, isn't that right? Let us hear about that.
Speaker 3:Oh, nice, nice, you can't beat a lettuce pun. Okay, you've really done your research. Yeah, so I used to be the Britain editor. Liz Truss, famously, our inglorious and very short-lived prime minister, was famously compared to a lettuce and the genesis of that was a leader that I wrote. And then some geniuses at the Daily Star saw that comparison and set up the webcam which had her and the lettuce juxtaposed for a few days to see who would last longer. So I played some small part in a meme which is a really odd, odd experience. I wrote the column and then forgot about it. It was a leader actually wrote, wrote the leader, um had to do something else, and then it sort of it went. It went viral very, very quickly, um, which is kind of an odd experience for someone like me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I guess that's how the whole world of influencers work. You know, if you try too hard you don't get there, and then all of a sudden a lettuce opportunity comes along and a prime minister who probably should be listening to should have been listening to boss class anyway probably to some of the lessons that she might have might have gleaned from the people that you talked to.
Speaker 3:I went to a play which was about Truss's premiership. It was a sort of fringe play and a sort of one-woman show and there's a point in it where the lettuce comes out and the character basically says, you know, made up by some sort of ignorant fool at the Economist, and I was sort of sitting there in anonymity but feeling vaguely uncomfortable about about the whole thing. So it's I'm I'm comfortable not to not to be too well known for it not to be too well known for it.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you talked about, uh, research. Um, there, I like to research my guests as much as I can, because then at least I have an idea what they're talking about. Um, and one of the things that always impresses me about Boss Class is the depth of research that seems to go into creating the series. And I listened to season one. I remember listening to it. Actually, I was passing through Dubai at the time and I was on a treadmill and I was listening to somebody talking about hiring and how to get that right and I was quite hooked.
Speaker 2:I heard you walking through some sort of was it a trail in Norway or somewhere? You were doing some sort of outward bound somewhere in the Scandinavia. So it's like all this was coming together and and it was full of fascinating conversations. And season two is shaping up as we're. As we're recording this, you're partway through the release of season two shaping up in the same way. Just for the benefit of my listeners, who may not know what we're talking about yet. Who is this podcast for and why did you decide to create a second season?
Speaker 3:Well, public demand was just overwhelming, gerry. That was really the reason. So the idea of the podcast is how to be a good manager. That is the kind of strapline for it. So it's basically translating some of the personality of the column, but using the advantages of audio in service of that same mission.
Speaker 3:So you know, very big picture, lots of people go into management without any kind of training. Lots of people are selected for positions as managers on the basis of being good at something else. I'm sure that you know a lot of your conversations kind of reflect that truth. So a whole universe of people who are in positions of authority and don't quite know what to do or are being managed by people who plainly don't know what to do, and that felt like a very big opportunity.
Speaker 3:So each of the podcast episodes and you're right, we're into the second season now there are different formats we use, but the spine of it is we have thematic episodes, we take a topic hiring in the first season you mentioned. In this season we're doing things like how to negotiate, how to manage a crisis, how to present and use the very privileged access that we have at the Economist and the very talented people we have on the podcast team to hopefully put together something which coheres as a narrative and ends up with something practical at the end of it. So as a kind of as a resource for people who want to know how to manage better in the workplace. That's our goal.
Speaker 2:So we're going to dive into that a little bit more in a minute. I think what's nice about it is this juxtaposing of the kind of really nicely produced episodes of soundbites and you commenting on that, and then we get to the in-depth conversations where they are really fascinating to listen to. So I would encourage anybody out there who hasn't yet discovered Boss Class and who likes to listen to podcasts obviously you do, because you wouldn't be listening to this so please go out there and check it out and take out whatever subscriptions on offer at the time, because I think lots of great stuff to discover there. So you talked about four buckets or four themes that kind of pervade the current season. Let's maybe start to unpack some of that. I mean, obviously I've only had the chance to listen to some of the interviews that you've done and some of the content and that, and so I'll do my best to interact with that.
Speaker 2:But you talked about managers as amplifiers of culture and strategy, and I guess there's that famous quote from Peter Drucker that said that famously said culture eats strategy for breakfast. And in terms of implementing a strategy, that probably still holds true because you know, whatever happens, it's cut down to people's behavior. So what did you discover about translating strategy into day-to-day behavior?
Speaker 1:on leading people. The goal is to bring you cutting-edge thought leadership from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in leadership today. Each guest shares their insights, wisdom and practical advice so we can all get better at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share a link with friends, family and colleagues, and stay informed by joining our leading people LinkedIn community of HR leaders and talent professionals.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So what I was trying to do is think about not so much the thematic buckets that we have for each episode, but what are the themes that run across the series as a whole. And one of them was this sort of very obvious conundrum that bosses face, particularly if you're right at the top of a big organisation, which is you can't be everywhere. So how do you amplify your message, how do you transmit a set of behaviours or values, a culture in other words, given that you're one person up against multiple locations or many, many people in a company, and so, thinking about that, you sort of little things come out from different, different episodes. So, you know, most obviously people repeat themselves an awful lot, and just being willing to repeat yourself over and over again seems like a very unappreciated skill of a leader. So once you know what your strategy is, what you're trying to do, you just have to say it over and over and over again.
Speaker 3:The second thing is using, as well as words, objects. So we talked to Michelle Goss, who's the boss of Levi's, and one of the things that in our conversation we talked about was her use of an object to convey a strategy. So she likes to talk about at Levi's, the denim company, using the microscope and the telescope. And so for a retailer, you use the microscope to look at real world data that's coming through the stores, and then for the telescope, you're looking on the horizon for trends that are coming and that's a sort of reasonably memorable idea. But what she's done is create these key rings. She's had these key rings made. She's given them to 250 of her senior leadership. It is, you know, microscope on one end, telescope on the other. So it's a sort of clunking metaphor. It's not subtle but it is a sort of way of kind of her being there and her voice being in people's minds as they go about their job.
Speaker 3:But I think probably the most systematic example that we spoke to and this will be in the culture episode that's coming out a couple of weeks after we record this is with a medical devices company called Striker, whose boss is called Kevin Lobo, and he and the company as a whole have this very methodical way of translating a culture and amplifying a message in everything that they do. So their culture is they describe it as high performance and high humility, pretty hard-nosed but also not tolerant of egos. And again, I think the interesting thing there is just how systematic they are. So there's the mission statement, there is an organisational lever. So when a division gets too big at Stryker, they basically chop it in half, and the idea then is that you're back to being an underdog and you've got to kind of scramble and be hungry in order to regain a top spot.
Speaker 3:Uh, there are clearly hiring processes that look for a particular type of person. Uh, there are, um, there are the use of Clifton strengths. I'm sure you know this, jerry, do you have you come across this in your?
Speaker 2:yeah so um pretty well read, yes.
Speaker 3:Okay, I bet you, I bet Of course you are, of course you are. But, um, the this, this is there, it is. I mean cactuses and books, I can see, I can see it all. Um, but that, so, uh, they use that language as a common language in the organization so that everyone sort of speaks a striker language. Everyone has a sense of their top five strengths, is pinned to their cubicles. They all kind of have this gel and you can sort of go through other things. You know if you're, if you hit your, if you're 99.9% of the way to your target, you've missed your budget, that kind of thing. So practices that also enforce this kind of sense of what matters to Stryker. I think what came across from that was, just once you start to think about different levers for amplifying a message, you realise there are very many of them, but lots of leaders and organisations don't think systematically about them, they don't sort of categorise them, they don't think about how they should operate each of them.
Speaker 2:This was a good, I think, worked example of someone projecting themselves very systematically in multiple channels through a global organization and the other area I I even from the earlier episodes so far have been this how companies go about the innovation part, which also you know. I think you talk to lego and you talk to other organizations about how they and you had the guys with the um in-vehicle self-driving cars and that, how they they also. I guess that's a cultural thing, to get people to think in a different way yes, it's cultural, it's mindset.
Speaker 3:I mean, what we tried to do in the innovation episode was counter the idea that innovation involves people sitting around on beanbags or playing table tennis or posting things on sticky notes on on walls, that it is a kind of grinding and nonlinear process. So Wave, which is that self-driving car company that you mentioned, that's an eight-year journey based on an idea that was once an outlier in the industry and has become progressively more orthodox, and a combination of iterating and innovating. So a portfolio approach where you have some people in the company coming up with new ideas and going after them in a small scale at first and then building up and, in the other parts of the company, sort of iterating incrementally on things where they know they need to make progress. So I think that the innovation message is that this is not the kind of classic genius has a serendipitous idea and everything is great. It's much more complicated, takes time, sustained effort and lots and lots of different people working on lots and lots of different things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the neuroscience actually shows that there are very few aha moments in innovation. They are moments that are arrived at after intensive thinking and experimenting. Yes, the moments come when you're least expecting, perhaps when you're not focused on them. But aha moments are rare by themselves. They're always the product of a lot of deep thinking and a lot of exploration beforehand. I believe, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally right, and one of the messages of an interview we do with the boss of Corning Corning is a glass company. It makes the coverings on your smartphone, the one that you've got with you right now is that you cannot time the market for innovation. What you can do is work in a direction where you can be reasonably confident that at some point it will pay off. So in their instance, they're looking at making glass stronger and more damage resistant, and at some point that is going to pay off. So the iPhone glass was based on compositions which were actually developed in the 1960s to create thickened windscreens for cars. That didn't work very well, because you don't actually want people colliding with thickened windscreens. It turns out, but that composition is very useful at the point when Steve Jobs comes along and says you know, have you got anything which might work for me?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I have a question before we leave the sort of theme of culture. I think you had the privilege of visiting a lot of these people in their buildings, if I'm not mistaken. Today it's not so easy, but you know, I've always loved to go to clients that I've worked with to actually absorb what's going on. When you went to those places was what you were hearing palpable in the, just in the corridors and just moving around those buildings, or were there any people in those buildings? Maybe that's? I should have asked you that first.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, there are. There are people in buildings. I mean, of course, if you're going in as a journalist, then people are going to behave in a slightly different way. So there's always a bit of a filter and some things are not signals at all. So almost every place you go to will have words written on walls which have nice abstract nouns that don't mean much. So that's not a signal. So that's not a signal.
Speaker 3:But people, you know a CEO who will kind of come and meet you or is sort of operating in an open plan office. We went to Novo Nordisk and the CEO there was kind of sitting in an actually standing in an open plan office, and that's a bit of a signal. You know, if you're going to talk about openness and collaboration but you're buried in a corner office and you can't get there except through a private lift, then that's a bit of dissonance. So there are some things that you can tell where and this takes us onto the theme of kind of you know, feedback coming up and towards bosses, but where their philosophy was being lived in front of our eyes you could actually see the sort of idea of continuous improvement, the idea of managers going out and talking directly to their members, as they call them. That was going on and it was impossible to simulate that that was embedded in the way that they operated.
Speaker 2:One of the key themes of this podcast is how to bring out the best in yourself and others. So getting other people to follow a strategy to shape a culture is one thing. One of the early episodes is this fantastic self-deprecation you did when you went to presentation, public speaking training, where you sort of with your knees and your jaw and everything else and the thread coming out of your head and everything. But there was a very important message. There wasn't there about the whole aspect of how to manage yourself and how to do this in. You know, because a lot of leaders have to do it. It's required of them to be able to stand up in front of other people but also walk their talk in that way, so they're role models for what they expect other people to do. What sorts of things did you learn as you had these conversations about that?
Speaker 3:So presenting is really interesting actually, because I spent a day with RADA, which is the famous acting school in London, and they have an arm which does this presentation coaching for executives and I don't enjoy it myself. I'm not good at it's sort of spending a bit of time was very useful in terms of just taking me out of myself and getting a few techniques in terms of self things that I was doing wrong. So you know, you lock your knees and you're you're shot. It's just like a disaster and posture and all of that, that kind of stuff. But probably the most important thing that I heard on that day was the coach used this phrase turn selfie view off.
Speaker 3:So, rather than thinking only about yourself and how you get through a presentation, you think about the audience, what it is that you are trying to get across to them, what emotion you are trying to evoke in them. So that was a kind of useful framing device a really obvious one, but a useful one for sort of thinking differently about what it is that you're doing and what you're trying to project. And I think that is a kind of habit of mind that typifies people who are really good at leading. They kind of know what it is that they have to do and they know how they come across and they think about it very, very intentionally.
Speaker 3:So in the first season I'm reminded of a conversation we had with Emma Walmsley, who's the CEO of GSK big drugs firm, who kind of just talked very openly about like I know that my interactions with people are going to sort of determine their day. Like if I'm stroppy or grumpy or kind of off with them then it's going to ruin their day and possibly their week. So sort of putting on that CEO cloak and mask and set of behaviours was very consciously done and I think some bosses don't think about that at all and others really do spend quite a lot of time thinking about that and it comes across. Another example of season one is an executive called Claire Hughes-Johnson who writes a manual about how she likes to work and she gives it. Have you got the book?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's a big chunky book.
Speaker 3:It is chunky. It is chunky but it's very practical. It is a manual. Actually it's like a reference book, but she writes this document which is kind of working with Claire is what it's called, and it's basically a kind of. This is how I like to operate. You know, I like this kind of data to be given to me in this form. I will take normally take, you know, a couple of days to digest information before making a decision. So if you want something faster, you need to come and bug me, and that level of sort of overtly articulating what it is that you are like to work with and what your own preferences are is not commonly done but is very useful in sort of holding a mirror up to yourself and then also kind of training people around you on kind of.
Speaker 2:These are the norms and the preferences you're listening to leading people with me jerry marais. My guest this week is andrew palmer, senior editor at the economist and host of the boss class podcast. Coming up, we explore negotiation, decision making and how to navigate. A Another area that you covered where turning selfie view off is quite useful, because I teach it as well is negotiations being able to put yourself in the shoes of the people that you're negotiating with, and I think was it the guys, which was the guys who said listen, listen, listen and then listen, listen, listen when you're negotiating. I find actually I personally find that to be one of the most useful pieces of advice you could give anybody. Tell us a bit about that experience. You went to the Diamond area in New York. You talked to negotiators there. You talked to people teaching at Harvard. You talked to Wendy Sherman about the Iran deal, etc. Wendy Sherman about the Iran deal, etc. What emerged from those conversations? Where, if you could synthesize them, what were some of the things that you took away?
Speaker 3:and said well, so we started from a position of great ignorance, and when I say we, I mean I, and that's always a useful starting point. So we'd set it up that episode by going to the Diamond District. It's basically the place where most diamonds come into America. It's it's an extremely odd. It's just one street in Midtown Manhattan. It's a kind of weird process of almost going back in time, like everyone looks like they've come from Starsky and Hutch.
Speaker 3:There's another reference from a longstanding kind of person, and everyone has got dealmaking in their blood. So you sort of feel like you're a little kind of you're defenseless. At some point you're going to end up buying something that you don't want and spending a lot of money. So that's how we set the episode up and then talk to a variety of people. So, as you say, jim Sabinius of Harvard, but also people who have done negotiating for a living.
Speaker 3:Wendy Sherman negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, raffaella Pimenta is a football agent who represents Erling Haaland, among other people. So people who live and breathe this, and their advice I think can be summarized as saying that, although you might sort of conceptualize negotiating as that moment of the transaction, when you're basically talking about price, it feels like a zero-sum game. It's much richer than that, and if you're teaching this, you will. You will, I'm sure, be saying something, something similar that a lot of it is in the setup, that it is sort of knowing what people want, your own side included.
Speaker 3:What are your walkaway points? Where is a negotiating negotiation happening? How are you building alliances with people who should be on your side and, potentially, those who are not? So? If you listen to the extended interview with Wendy Sherman, for example, a lot of it is the drama of being in a hotel with the Iranians and trying to get it across the finishing line, but a lot of it is about how do you win around these multiple partners that the US had at the time. How do you win around people within the American political system? I mean, things have obviously changed a lot there now, but it's that stuff that happens away from the table, in the language of the episode, that really determines success once you get there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she gives that great example. We won't explore it further, but the one about the grandchildren and the conversation that finding something human about the other people was something that she she emphasized quite a bit, even though she realized that I think you don't necessarily always trust them or love them and you can still see them as human beings doing their job. I think that's. That was an important, that's something I got out of it anyway, when she was explaining yeah, there was a.
Speaker 3:there's another example where um you, you might, you might struggle even more to summon up empathy. We talked to Curtis Minder, who's a ransomware negotiator. At the point where the cyber attack has happened and a firm has decided they have no choice but to pay, he's the person who gets pulled in to negotiate on the dark web with criminal organizations to recover data. And it's very hard to feel empathy for those people. But he's definitely saying you know, you must not treat them as, as criminals. You need to kind of somehow, you know, make them feel respected, find some ground on which you can operate as negotiators, okay.
Speaker 2:And before we move on to another theme, I just want to know how your wife took it when you didn't buy her that ring. Because did she say, where's that diamond ring? You sold, the guy sold you.
Speaker 3:So I'm basically trying to get her not to listen to that episode. So you know, that's just. I'm sort of like skipping that one. So you know, I, when she listens to your podcast, jerry, the game is up. The game is up.
Speaker 2:Okay, so some of the other themes that you, you, you, you touch on is the whole area of, like, decision-making, um, and what? What came out of those conversations around decision making?
Speaker 3:yeah, so, um, it's. It's one of the defining acts of a manager, one of the things that makes organizations run, and it's amazing how bad humans are at it for for various reasons. So I'm just, as as we speak, in the process of writing the column based on the episode on decision-making and there's just some really fun stuff around how kind of stupid humans are and how liable they are to make bad decisions. So you know, people will bid stocks higher when it's sunny, and the more sunny it is, the more they're willing to pay. And if you have a good which is packaged in plastic but then wrap paper around it completely unnecessary, extraneous paper people will pay more for it because they think it's environmentally sustainable. So I mean, basically, it's a wonder that humans have succeeded at all. So you're kind of facing that problem how do you make good decisions?
Speaker 3:And the episodes' messages kind of boil down to given that individuals are susceptible to these kind of biases and flaws in thinking, it's up to organizations to put in place processes that lead to better outcomes. One of the first questions that you have to ask is what kind of decision is it? So this is the Amazon language around one-way doors and two-way doors. A one-way door is a decision that's costly. To reverse Two-way door, you can go back reasonably easily and so deciding what the consequences of failure are are they big, are they small? And then calibrating speed to that is really important. And then the next question has gone up who is taking the decision? And clarity about that is often missing in organizations and is a cause of delay and frustration. And so another of the organizations and is a cause of delay and frustration. And so another of the episodes we did and interviews we did was with Supercell. Are you a big mobile games player, jerry?
Speaker 2:No, I'm not, but I have a daughter working in the industry, so I do hear about online games and stuff from her.
Speaker 3:Okay, so Supercell makes makes clash of clans and heyday and other titles that I'm not familiar with. But we went to supercell, which makes these things very successful, gaming company in helsinki which has a very radical way of thinking about autonomy and games. Teams there are basically empowered to take decisions that in other organizations would be unthinkable, including a decision to kill a game. So you can have teams that are working on these things for years sometimes, but if they don't think it's going to work, then they are able on their own to basically say we're done, and they do do that. Their incentives, you'd think, would be perhaps not to do that, but they do do that. You know their incentives, you'd think would be perhaps not to do that, but they do do that.
Speaker 3:So the boss there is self-described the least powerful CEO in the world, a Finn called Ilka Parnanen. And you know autonomy people are comfortable with, they're already sort of some way to answering that second question. I mean a long way. Actually, it's almost the defining part of their culture. So if you know how to parse a decision into ones that matter and ones that matter less, if you know who's taking the decision and then if you have a process which gets rid of some of those cognitive biases that we talked about earlier, then you're, in very broad terms, a long way towards having a better outcome yeah, and I think I'm just going to briefly reflect what michelle gas said about data versus instinct, and that's her microscope telescope, kind of that.
Speaker 2:You know, whilst data is useful and probably a lot of decisions need data, you still need that sense of what the data is telling you totally yeah, and instinct as well.
Speaker 3:So she used to work at starbucks. She was the person behind um, the pumpkin spice latte, uh, and although it's not a drink I've tried, it is clearly, you know, civilizationally very important. And at the point that they were thinking about that, consumers did not like the idea of like a pumpkin in their coffee, reasonably enough. It sounds disgusting. But within Starbucks they were testing this thing, felt like it was going to be great and, importantly, also sort of asked that, asked that question how bad would it be if it failed and rolled it out. And it's now a very important part of popular culture.
Speaker 2:One of my favourite episodes so far is the jazz improv. I'm a musician myself, but I'm a musician myself. It's guided me in so many things I've done where you, I mean. I play Irish traditional music, but it has a similar kind of approach. Nobody's ever playing the same notes twice. We're all in the same key, kind of playing the same melody. Jazz musicians are really good at this. They're incredibly sophisticated at working off a sort of some sort of standard but then allowing things to happen. Tell our list, tell my listeners a little bit about that experience of talking to it was it was a famous jazz musician and a professor. Is that right? Who studies this stuff? Isn't that what you did?
Speaker 3:Yes, that's right. So this in our episode of crisis management we start off talking to two, two academics, but one of them is a very accomplished jazz musician, a trombonist in New York, who have worked together for almost two decades to kind of teach the lessons of jazz for crisis management, of skepticism that this would work. But they were very persuasive, partly by not over claiming but partly by playing, playing musical examples that actually brought home their messages that there was something in the kind of improvisational but practiced culture of jazz that one could learn from. And the episode features some great stuff. But the like, the moment which stands out to me is they play this recording of Ella Fitzgerald in a Berlin nightclub singing Mac the Knife, and she forgets the lyrics and just starts improvising and she literally is sort of singing what are the words? But does so in such a kind of amazingly smooth, um way that you kind of don't notice and when you do notice it's nothing but delightful.
Speaker 3:Uh, and the one of the lessons of that is that by spending enough time planning, having a reservoir of of knowledge, um and um in, in their words, kind of values, that you can kind of find a way to cope even with very novel situations. So it's not a question of having really detailed contingency plans for any outcome, but there was enough of a sort of hinterland and a store of knowledge there that she could get through that and that is a transferable lesson. So it was great. It was really interesting just to talk to musicians as well as kind of how they think about about that. So can I ask you a question, jerry?
Speaker 2:um, okay, I allow some guests to interview me on my own purpose.
Speaker 3:Okay, yes, all right, fine, don't worry, it's not. It's not. It's not like interrogative. I just so, when you're in your group in this, in the irish um group, is there a leader?
Speaker 2:Not officially. No, there's no leader because we're working off each other all the time. It's kind of verboten in the Irish music world to have a leader in a trad band because everybody brings their own different instruments, because often we're playing these kind of. Some of these things like the Aileen Pipes and those type of instruments are quite unique and it's about finding how to bring out, give each person their space to create the contribution they can to creating a sound and shaping that sound. And you know you're exploring all the time to find out what works. You know we would take a song.
Speaker 2:I've made four albums. You know you take a song and you some songs. You just strip them back and you, you, you play hardly anything because that song needs to have more space and breathing to breathe. And other songs, you throw the kitchen sink at it because maybe there's more rhythm in it and you want to create a big sound and that. But you never start off with a preconceived notion of what should be and that. But you never start off with a preconceived notion of what should be.
Speaker 2:And one thing I wanted to mention was, in case people aren't aware, those jazz musicians are highly talented in what they do. They're what a friend of mine calls brilliant at the basics already. What they do is they do this on top, you know. So it's not like they come up and they don't know how to play. They know how to play, you know. So that's a little bit how it works in my experience, and Irish traditional musicians love to sit in a corner of a pub and just jam with each other. They just there is. No, you never recreate that experience again. It's just a unique thing. It lives in your memory somewhere and you take it away forever and you think of that time.
Speaker 2:I sat with that guy and I never I forgot to ask him his name. I sat with that guy and I never I forgot to ask him his name. I sat with him for two hours and played music and I forgot who he was. So it's the kind of way it works. But, by the way, I wanted to mention as well I had Margaret Heffernan on the program, the show, a few.
Speaker 2:She came on a few months ago and she's her latest book is called Embracing Uncertainty interviewed musicians and many other people in the artistic world because she reckoned that there was a lesson for business out there, who tried to predict everything. And she said you know who are the people in professionally who live with uncertainty as a professional. It's part of their professional identity and every time you walk out on stage, no matter how well rehearsed you are at that, you never know what's going to happen, because the audience is different every night and you just don't know how they're going. So you respond to that and when you're open to that, that's how you do your performances. You don't just say we'll play it the same way we played it last night. You go and you work with what the audience gives you back in terms of energy and I thought I thought the conversation I had with her was fascinating in terms of how she'd researched this and she was putting forward this idea.
Speaker 3:That totally reinforces the messages from the two Columbia Business School professors that the nature of a crisis is that it's novel and unexpected and you're confronting things for the first time. So how do you respond to that? And the answer is not to kind of centralise and follow a script. It's to give people who kind of are at the front lines and seeing what's unfolding, the ability to react to these new and challenging circumstances. So again, one of those messages that at the start wasn't totally sure how would that work, but in its outlines at least that made sense. Yeah't totally sure, like how would that work, but in its outlines at least that made sense yeah, and that kind of reinforces.
Speaker 2:That thing that many ceos say is yeah, I, I need to have the best people in the room and my job is to bring out the best in them. You know, I need the best finance people, the best marketing people and, in a way, the jazz metaphor is a little bit like that, you know, because each week and each month there's maybe something different on the horizon which is challenging. So you can't just say what we did last month will work again next month. You have to be able to say what do we need to play? Using the metaphor again, what way do we need to play to get through this crisis or get through this next period? Anyway, coming to the end, andrew, so I've I got a couple, maybe two, questions to finish with, based on everything you've heard. In boss class, this is a tough one. What makes a good, what makes a great boss?
Speaker 3:oh, jerry, don't ask that question. I mean, I don't think there's a, I don't think there's a really succinct answer to this, but, um, I guess my, you know, the prevailing message of almost everything that we have done on the podcast series and in the column is that balance is the key thing. You are trying to marry some really, really difficult things here. Right, you've got the sort of needs of the organisation and the needs of individuals. You kind of want to know what people are doing, but you want to stand back and let them get on with it. You want to be approachable but you don't want to be too friendly, and so all of those difficult balancing acts sort of constitute a good manager. It's very hard to do and it's almost impossible, I would say, to get all of it, all of it right. But being aware of those tensions, those things that pull you in different directions, and trying to trying to navigate your way through it, I guess, I guess is the would be my answer. It is a sort of balancing act.
Speaker 2:So that would probably be your big takeaway, which was part of my next question. But I will ask the first part of my next question, which is if you were to give one short piece of advice to new managers we started talking about this early on, about how people are thrown into management jobs. What would be some sound advice you'd give a young person out there who now knows that they're going to step in or has just got been given the title manager or supervisor, whatever. What would you get? What would you say to them?
Speaker 3:Well, firstly, subscribe to the Economist and listen to Boss Class, and I mean, basically, that's it. Obviously, there's no, there's no need to do anything more. But if you don't do that, then I would say, actually kind of being explicit, articulating things is really important. So what is it that you value, how do you like to work, what is the strategy, what is the cadence at which you're going to be meeting people? And you know, literally writing it down. We're still fans of writing here, despite doing other things. And being being very explicit about that is a useful, useful discipline. It will force you to hone your thinking and also just just sort of confront you with all the things that you have to get get right from from culture to. You know the amount of meetings that you want to, you want to run. So write, write things down, make things explicit. I think that would be my tip.
Speaker 2:So what's next for you, Andrew? More Boss Class, more Bartleby, or something completely different?
Speaker 3:In the foreseeable future, it'll be more of the same, so we're already working on plans for a third season, which would come out early next year. The column continues to run every single week in the Economist. I now write a newsletter for subscribers as well, so it's a one-man franchise. Gerry, it's unstoppable Immediate juggernaut.
Speaker 2:Right, okay. So how do people get in contact with this unstoppable immediate juggernaut? Is LinkedIn a good place to start, and I'll put links in the show notes.
Speaker 3:How do you make contact with a juggernaut? I mean, that doesn't sound like something you should do. So again, subscribe. Subscribe to the Economist. That's the answer to everything, but I can be found on LinkedIn. I do accept emails, bartleby at economistcom.
Speaker 2:Uh, mainly, though, listen to, listen to the podcast and let us know what you think so, as always, andrew, thanks for sharing your insights, tips and wisdom with me and my listeners here today. Thank you, jerry, that was really fun.
Speaker 1:Coming up on Leading People.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and again, I think the emotional aspects of change is so important and I think, again, it's one of those areas we kind of perhaps underestimate the importance of emotions in terms of how we work, how we perform, how we feel about organizational change. So, yeah, as you say, interception is another really interesting new area and that's another reason it drove me to want to write the third edition, to go and explore it more with with neuroscientists, and what it's all about is that ability to pick up on our that. We talk about gut feelings and again, science says there's something to it. Um, you know, we do have gut feelings and and it's about the ability to pick up accurately on those feelings and some people are better at it than others.
Speaker 2:My next guest is workplace neuroscience expert and author, Hilary Scarlett. We explore the surprising ways that brain science can help leaders guide people through change, foster collaboration and build cultures of psychological safety. It's a thought provoking conversation you won't want to miss. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another One Simple Thing episode waiting for you A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast. Until next time.
