Bestselling authors and hosts of the TED podcast Fixable, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss reinvent how to lead change--with a radical approach that moves fast, builds trust, and accelerates excellence.
Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Meta (Facebook) made "Move fast and break things" its motto--and then proceeded to deliver on it--they fueled a cynical but widely accepted assumption that a certain amount of wreckage is the price we must pay for inventing the future.
Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is seriously wrongheaded--and that it keeps leaders from achieving excellence. Helping companies solve their toughest problems over the past decade, the authors have learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false. The best change leaders, according to Frei and Morriss, solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their organizations--employees, customers, and shareholders--even stronger. They move fast and fix things.
Based on their work with Uber, Riot Games, WeWork, and other fast-moving companies, Frei and Morriss reinvent the playbook for leading change. With trust as the foundation for a "move fast and fix things" approach, the authors reveal the five practices that the most effective leaders use to build trust, accelerate the pace of change, and improve their organizations:
- Identify the right problem to solve.
- Run small experiments before scaling solutions.
- Build the case for change while driving it.
- Empower the organization.
- Champion difference.
With chapters that provide a "one-week plan," Frei and Morriss show how to execute these five priorities on a fast cycle time of "one per day." By the end of the week, you won't just have a road map for solving your company's toughest problems--you'll already be well on your way, transforming your company at an exhilarating speed.
About the Author: Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. She served as Uber's first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture. Frei regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale organizational transformation. Her TED talk on the topic of building trust has six million views.
Anne Morriss is a highly sought-after leadership coach and the founder of the Leadership Consortium, a first-of-its-kind leadership accelerator that works to help emerging leaders thrive. Her collaborators have ranged from early-stage tech founders to Fortune 50 executives to public sector leaders building national competitiveness.
Frei and Morriss are the coauthors of the bestselling books Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business and Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. They are the cohosts of the TED podcast Fixable, on which this book is based.
Connect with Frances Frei on LinkedIn and Twitter and at hbs.edu and TED. Connect with Anne Morriss at on LinkedIn and Twitter and at Thinkers50.com.