#30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition

Today, I’m joined by speaker, international executive and five-time author Margaret Heffernan. We discuss how to get the most out of our people, creating a thriving culture of trust and collaboration, and how to prevent potentially devastating “willful blindness.” Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to the Farnham Street Podcast called The Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, the curator behind the Farnham Street blog, which is an online community focused on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. The Knowledge Project is where we talk with interesting people to uncover frameworks you can use to learn more in less time, make better decisions, and live a happier and more meaningful life. Margaret Heffernan is on the show today, the former CEO of five businesses. She's learned how human thought patterns lead us astray. She's the author of a book called Willful Blindness, which examines why businesses and the people who run them ignore the obvious and the resulting consequences, as well as a book called Beyond Measure,

• 0:50Shane Parrish?

  which looks at how tiny changes can make a ginormous impact. Enjoy the conversation.

• 1:09Shane Parrish?

  First of all, you wrote a book called Beyond Measure, which looks at how tiny changes lead to big changes. What one reviewer on Amazon said was, "This book is filled with specific and meaningful examples of how to transform the work environment in order to improve not only performance and outcomes, but also the collective and individual experiences of all employees." Let me begin with this. I'd like to hear about the smallest change you've seen make the largest difference in a wide variety of organizations.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Well, I guess the easiest one for me to talk about is the one that I did within one of my companies. So as you probably know, I've spent most of my life in England, but in 1994, I moved to the US. My husband got a position at Harvard, and after looking around a bit, I ended up running tech companies for a venture capital firm. So the first company that I was running, I did what you would expect, which is hired all sorts of extraordinary and wonderful people and gave them all sorts of uh hard problems to solve.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  And my observation was that everybody came into work and worked very diligently and went home again. And the thing I chiefly remember is it didn't sound right. It wasn't a sort of uh what I think of as a sort of jolly hum. And it certainly didn't sound like companies I'd run in the UK. And I I thought about this and I was trying to figure out what's wrong. Is it just that, you know, this is the US, it's not the UK and companies sound different? But I just felt it was all a little bit too tasky. It was a little bit too um tactical. And I, you know, what I chiefly remembered for my companies in the UK was

• 3:10Speaker 01

  um at the end of the day, or and definitely on a Friday, people would go to the pub and wait for the horrible London rush hour to subside.

• 3:18Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  And I thought, well, this is Boston and um you know, about eight months of the year, it's winter. And everybody drives and there aren't any pubs. So that's definitely not an option. And um so I thought, well, what the heck, I'm just on Friday and just gonna tell everyone to down tools at half past four. And um and every week, three people are going to tell us who they are and why are they here? And um and it was, I, you know, it really was beyond awkward, I have to say. Um because it, I mean, it felt very clunky, but I honestly was at my wit's end and I just didn't know what else to do. So I thought, what the heck, let's give this a shot.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, to be honest, the engineers mostly did PowerPoint presentations and the marketing people mostly did kind of stand-up comedy routines. Um, but what it did is it stopped people looking at each other in terms of function and made them start to look at each other as human beings. And it was absolutely transformative in the way that people started to relate to each other and talk to people and, you know, talk to people in the lunchroom and sometimes even spend, you know, go to a movie together or see each other at weekends or whatever.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  And it was quite interesting because many, many years later, I was talking about this at an HR conference in Boston. And unbeknownst to me, one of my former employees was actually in the conference. And in the Q and A session, she, you know, put her hand up and said, I was there. It was absolutely transformative. And she remembered virtually every detail of these sessions. And, you know, so I think this is about as simple as they come. Um, but it was really my rather lame but effective attempt to get people to see each other as human beings, not as titles, not as tasks, not as experts, certainly not as

• 5:29Speaker 01

  rivals, but just to, you know, what I would now call build social capital.

• 5:36Shane Parrish?

  Why do you think that we're more in tune with our workplace or more productive or happier, uh, when we have a human connection to the people we're spending so much of our time with?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think the, the basic thing is that in any organization, you know, the whole premise of organizational life.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Is that together you can do more than you can do in isolation. But that only works if people are connected to each other. And it only really works if they trust each other and help each other. And that isn't automatic. And I would even argue, and have argued at some length, that in fact, I think there's a lot that happens to people as they're growing up. That if they did that naturally to begin with, they learn how not to do it. Instead, how to regard each other as rivals and competitors. Um, so you're only really going to get the value out of organizational life to the degree

• 6:39Speaker 01

  that people begin to feel safe with each other, to trust each other, to want to help each other. And the way I think about that these days is, um, not surprisingly, I think of it as a network. And I think of in that all the collective knowledge of the organization flowing through that network. And what impedes the flow is distrust, rivalry, or not knowing what other people need. So to the degree that people are open and generous and information flows quickly, it'll find the problem that it is destined to solve.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  But all of the distances between people, all of the distrust or just ignorance as to who people are and what they care about slows that flow down.

• 7:34Shane Parrish?

  Do you think a lot of organizations inadvertently create rivalry with incentive systems? Or how does that come to be when you think about an organization as a whole entity? There's very similar goals, but when you break it down into subentities, you have maybe competing or conflicting goals.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:53Shane Parrish?

  Why is it, do you think, that organizations develop such rivalries?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think there are a couple of things. I mean, so I think there are kind of sins of omission and sins of commission. Um, in other words, this, some of this happens organically and some of it does happen sadly, um, deliberately.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So the stuff that's deliberate is to do with definitely there are leaders out there who believe that the more people compete within an organization, um, the smarter and the better the organization will be. They pretty spectacularly misread Darwin. Um, and you know, Darwin, there's no evidence that Darwin was a social Darwinist. Um, and they've introduced systems like forced ranking. And forced ranking in effect get pits everybody against each other. And bear in mind, certainly in the US, that most people, the US and to be honest, the UK. Most people are coming out of competitive education systems.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Uh, they may have had very competitive, pushy parents. Um, you know, the prompt predominant metaphor for business in the US is around competitive sports.

• 9:09Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  So there's an awful lot of competitive mindset that comes into a company, whether you ask for it or not. And when you add on to that, systems like forced ranking and um, hierarchies, you foment necessarily status contests.

• 9:32Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  And what all of that does is it implies that if I help you, you might do better, which by inference means I do worse. So I'm now pretty, you know, if I'm thinking about this and if I feel threatened or anxious, then I'm not going to help you. And I might know exactly the person who could help you solve your problem or exactly the piece of information that would, you know, help you develop your product or whatever, but I may be quite reluctant to do that because of both the kind of implicit and explicit um, kinds of competition that exist within the company culture.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And I think that however much you say, you know, we're all in this together, we all need to help each other. You have to think quite carefully about where are where are these sources of competition coming from and what can I do to make it advantageous for people to help each other rather than compete with each other.

• 10:41Shane Parrish?

  A lot of organizations in response to that seem to think that they have to make seismic shifts to make seismic impacts. Part of what you're arguing is that, um, you know, I'm thinking about all of these grand restructurings we see in the business news almost every week and part of your argument is that that's not necessarily the case.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the data suggests that most of them won't work. The other thing people do, of course, is they think about silos and what they do literally is knock down walls, which I think is kind of comic. So they knock down walls and they get a whole bunch of sofas and and then they think they're done. And it's really interesting. I did some work with a big multinational um chemicals business some years ago and they did exactly this. Um, and and two things happened. One is they really had one of the most viciously competitive cultures I've ever seen in my life. And so none of that changed.

• 11:43Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  In fact, people were more withdrawn because they no longer even had offices in which they could be safe and generous to the few people they trusted.

• 11:55Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Um, and the other thing is that chief operating officer acknowledged to me that actually the real re, you know, they paid lip service to collaboration, but really the reason they'd done it is it just saved them a fortune in um real estate costs. So I think, you know, I think there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot in these restructurings that isn't necessarily strategic, although it's wrapped up as that.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And I think there's also a lot in in these restructurings that doesn't appreciate that actually the crucial thing here. Um, there are the sort of social bonds between people. And that doesn't have to take a fortune to address, but it is going to take time. And it is going to require that people understand why it matters as a business issue. It's not that we've all just become Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. And it does require people understand what the kind of critical behaviors are if you're really going to change a culture, which is after all, a stupendously difficult thing to do.

• 12:59Shane Parrish?

  What are the things that people do that change the culture that lend themselves to increasing the probability? I think I read somewhere when I was doing my MBA that the probability of changing a culture is, you know, under five percent. But there must be things that people can do that correlate to improved odds.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think um, I think it is very, I mean, obviously, it's really important who you hire. It's really important the signals you send to them as to the kinds of behaviors you want. Um, I think that having kind of critical people who appreciate the generosity is a business characteristic.

• 13:41Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Uh, it's not something you just say for out of work time. Um, I think that's really fundamental. Um, you know, that that the, if you really believe that the value of collaboration lies in the kind of um, aggregation or compounding of talent and creativity. Then you have to have an environment in which people are really prepared to help each other. And people are only really going to be prepared to help each other if they will feel that they in turn will be helped when they needed. And if you feel that not egregiously, but respectfully, you might get a bit of credit

• 14:25Speaker 01

  for your contribution, because people don't like to feel invisible quite lightly. So, um.

• 14:32Shane Parrish?

  So basically, people don't wanna feel like they'll be taken advantage of.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  They definitely don't, and you know, Adam Grant, of course, is brilliant on this subject. They don't wanna feel that they'll be taken advantage of, and as Adam has shown, people have quite a good sense of who the takers are.

• 14:46Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Um, but I think they also like to feel that their contribution has value, and the best way for them to feel that is for somebody to tell them. Now, that doesn't mean that every day you go into work and make the equivalent of Oscar's acceptance speech, you know, but it does mean that you kind of have to remember who helped you. And, um, and people whom other people want to help are very good in remembering those things.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, for me, one of the most fun parts of writing books, actually, the most fun part of writing a book is writing the acknowledgements, you know, because it's really fun to remember and to keep track of, if you can, all the people who helped you, but it's also, it's also a way of saying thank you.

• 15:36Shane Parrish?

  Why did you start writing books in the first place?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Good question. Um, well, I had run five businesses and I had got to the point of thinking, I don't wanna do this anymore. Um, I had hired and fired so many people, I was fairly burnt out. And I remember going to a fast company retreat of people that, I don't know, writers and think people they thought were interesting, and somebody there, and shame on me for not remembering who, um, said to me, you know, Margaret, just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it forever. And that really stuck with me. And I thought, well, I don't have to run companies forever. That's cool.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And I thought, so what I want to do next is I want some sort of business that requires no employees. Now, at that point, your options are pretty limited. And um, and also at the time, so this would be the early two thousands. Um, coaching was a pretty kind of Wild West. Uh, arena and it wasn't an area I wanted to go into. And a friend of mine, who's a literary agent in London, said, Margaret, you should write a book about the internet. And I thought about it for a long time and I thought, actually, it's either too early or too late. I'm not sure which, but it's. I don't have anything very interesting to say. And the world's full of books with nothing very interesting to say, so let's not add to that.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  But it did get me thinking, well, what would I like to write about? And so I think, you know, those different things, the wanting a business with no employees, the. Encouragement by my friend, the literary agent. And the great question was, you know, what? What is interesting enough to you that you might have something to say? I think that's pretty much the kind of combination of events that led to it. And it's fair to say, you know, before that I'd written a number of screenplays and radio plays and radio programs. And people had always said, wow, Margaret, you write really well. So it didn't feel like a completely bizarre concept.

• 17:53Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to you having wrote plays, um, but first, are there? Uh, you've run five businesses. Are there recurring patterns to the irrationality that you see happen in organizations you've observed from the outside and run? Um, do you think of it that way in terms of irrationality or the the things you write about simply kind of? Natural outcomes of bringing groups of people together to accomplish goals?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  I don't really think specifically about rationality versus irrationality.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I'm pretty allergic to anything binary, which is probably strange having a run software company. Um, but you know, I really, I think anytime I hear, well, it's either this or it's that, I know I'm being sold a pop. I think my experience is there's always more intelligence and talent in organizations than ma- than managers to get out and to surface and to be deployed. And I've always wondered why, and where does it go, and why does that happen, and where does it get stuck and trapped? And why, and I think also, I have always felt

• 19:07Speaker 01

  that it is in organizations specifically that very good people can go bad. And I've been endlessly fascinated by why or how that happens.

• 19:20Shane Parrish?

  How, how does that happen?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's, that is my whole book, Well, for Blindness, is really how that happens. Um, but I always felt that that wasn't about rationality or irrationality, it was all sorts of stuff. Um, kind of distracting or, um, sending people on detours from themselves. And I wondered, I wondered why. And, you know, so I, I used to wonder why you'd have a huge number of creative people doing very uncreative work. I wondered how you could get huge numbers of perfectly decent people doing really terrible things.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Um, I, you know, I think I was highly driven to run companies in a desire to try to not do that. Um, and this is very characteristic of, um, female entrepreneurs, which is a sort of sense that you know, I want to prove that it's possible to be successful and not do some of the crappy things that traditional managements do routinely. So I think, you know, I think all of those things were, you know, were kind of very, very big motivating forces, both in the companies that I ran and in the books that I've written. Of course, it's a, it's a very, it's very scary, right? Because I've run five companies and I've written five books. And now I think.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  If I were a numerologist, I'd be extremely anxious and looking for a new career right now.

• 20:56Shane Parrish?

  I wanna go back to something you said about people thinking in black and white. What do you think causes people to think that way?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Well, it's much easier. It's much easier. It's much easier to think that something is either good or bad, or black or white, or alive or dead. And of course, there are binaries in in human life, right? You either are alive or you're not. Um, and it's much more dramatic and we like drama. Uh, I just don't think it reflects the complexity or the richness of life very well. And I think that it um, it oversimplifies to the degree that much that is wonderful, fun and full of opportunity in life gets kind of run over when you simplify it that much.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  And it's kind of interesting because I think, um, I mean, I think about this quite a bit in the sense that I think a lot of my books are probably more complex than the genre likes. But perversely, I don't really mind.

• 22:04Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Because I'm really trying to talk about what I see as happening rather than trying to boil it down to a couple of do these three things and everything will be okay, because I just don't believe it's true. And I do, this is gonna sound really pretentious and pompous. But um, I do have a very bedrock belief that, you know, as the writer Cyril Connolly said, you know, a writer should be a lie detector. And um, so I do care probably disproportionately about trying to get things right. And that means they're not gonna be simple.

• 22:45Shane Parrish?

  When when you're writing, it's really, uh, it's probably easier to come at subjects from a place of nuance. But when you're in your day to day moment, when you catch yourself kind of thinking in black and white, how do you, how do you get out of that?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Well, I quite often think to myself, well, Margaret, if you think it's that simple, you have got to be wrong.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 23:07Shane Parrish?

  I like that.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Uh, you must be missing something. You absolutely must be missing something. So what's the counter argument? And some of that is, um, I mean, I just, I, you know, I, I just feel there's a sort of a demon on my shoulder saying, yeah, really? Who says so? How do you know? And it's also, of course, that, um, you know, in my book, Willful Blindness, there's this story about the epidemiologist Alice Stewart doing a study of childhood cancers and her terrific in, um, collaboration with the statistician George Neal.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  And George, who was very introverted, once said of his work with Alice, my job is to prove that she's wrong, because if I can't, then she knows she should persevere.

• 24:02Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, I just think that's such a phenomenal model of collaboration, which is, you know, the, the argument is a gift. And, and I think about this both in terms of, you know, business or writing or family life, you know, somebody who's prepared to listen and understand what you're saying well enough to argue with you, this is somebody who cares. And so it's just, it's, you know, it's just a very kind of fundamental part of the way I think.

• 24:35Shane Parrish?

  So often we see argument as a threat, not only, uh, probably to us. Why do you think that is?

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Well, sometimes, of course, it is, right? I mean, I'm not that naive. I know there are times people have argued with me at work, you know, not because they had my best interests at heart, but because they wanted my budget, right? So these things definitely do happen. But I think that, you know, when you're in a really good collaborative environment, the argument is about, that's not good enough, how do we make it better?

• 25:08Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Which is the crucial, the crucial kind of dialogue to have. Um, but of course, people will argue with you because their ideologies are different, in which case, maybe they see something you don't, so it behooves you to listen to them. And it certainly sharpens your own understanding if you are prepared to take it on board and think about, well. If that were true, what would that mean for what I see? Am I missing something? But I think, you know, obviously, we're living through a phase where mostly people aren't prepared to argue with each other. Um, they'll abuse each other in public, they'll abuse each other in social media.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  But they won't have what I think of as the real argument, which is let us together from different perspectives, explore this territory and figure out what's going on here.

• 26:00Shane Parrish?

  A lot of the people I seem to talk to who've um run businesses or been in senior management often. Come to this understanding later. At first, they see kind of argumentation or disagreement or thoughtful um challenging. As slowing them down. And later, only later, they come to see that as actually propelling them forward. Why do you think that is?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Well, I think, uh, you know, often, especially when you're not wildly grown up, it's really easy to take it personally. So and so argues with me, that means they don't like me, right? So you need a certain maturity to think beyond that. And especially if you have a very competitive mindset, of course, you've kind of got to get over that. So it takes a certain degree of of maturity and it takes a certain amount, I think, of intellectual rigor. Which is um, do you want to get it right or do you just want to win?

• 26:56Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Those are two very different things. Um, and I think it takes a long time, uh, even maybe I'm just talking about myself. I think it takes a long time to look back and think, well, in those situations, I did good work.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  In those situations, I did less good work. What was the difference? Because obviously, it's me in both places. So what were the conditions in which it was easier for me to do better work? And it's interesting because I think that, you know, we often tend to think, well, if I did good work, that's me. And I think one of the things I'm constantly probing is, of course, it's you, but it's also the environment and the context in which you're operating. So what is the context that's really conducive, you know, to creativity or productivity or,

• 27:58Speaker 01

  you know, perfectionism or whatever you're pursuing? Because I think this notion that you can do wonderful work, regardless of context, is romantic and naive.

• 28:15Shane Parrish?

  I would a hundred percent agree with that. What environment was conducive for you when you were running these companies to doing wonderful work?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I had an investor who argued with me quite a lot.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  And was a brilliant guy and I think we both understood it wasn't personal. So that was terrific. I had a hardcore of uh, people that I worked with for quite a long time and with whom I developed, you know, very high levels of trust and respect and freedom and safety, which is we could be very open with each other. I think a certain amount of pressure. I think that um, when I worked at the BBC, at one point, I made a documentary where I had a huge budget and a huge amount of time. And it's hands down the most boring thing I've ever done.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I mean, not for me, for the audience.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  It was just, you know, I researched it to death.

• 29:21Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  And um and what that taught me was actually I like having some pressure, you know, not insane pressure, but I do pretty well under pressure.

• 29:30Shane Parrish?

  You need a constraint.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  I need a constraint and actually my biggest danger is that I'll accept insane constraints and only afterwards realize, actually, Margaret, you just agreed to do something impossible. Um, but I like constraints, um, and I like doing things I've never done before. Um, I like trying to do something that I recognized from the outset is going to be difficult.

• 29:56Shane Parrish?

  As you were running these companies, how did you make decisions? Did you have a structure for how you went about doing that?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm pretty sure I didn't. Uh, which is to say, um, to the degree that we had a structure, we had, you know, a good senior leadership team in which debate was pretty easy. Um, I mean, I remember, for example, having on my member, on my senior leadership team, um, a really lovely guy named Will Richmond and Will was a, what I think of perhaps unfairly as a a classic Harvard Business School grad, which he was. So very, I think what you would call rational, very um logical, very thorough, very careful,

• 30:46Speaker 01

  um, very different from me, in other words. And um, and.

• 30:52Shane Parrish?

  He complimented you.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  And he asked some really hard questions that would always stop me in my tracks and they always made everything we did better.

• 31:01Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Um, and I think he found us rather baffling and I think some of us found him baffling, but there was no doubting his goodwill and serious intent. And um, and so I think we, you know, to the degree that we had a process, we all had to feel in our different ways that the decisions that were being made were for the good of the business. And this has been a kind of, um, I guess you could say hobby horse of mine, which is. I always thought as chief executive, my job was to do what was right for the business. And which would not necessarily be what I wanted, or what I liked, or what was fun, or what was easy.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  You know, I just thought the only job description is what's right for this business. And I think we all, you know, I think we all felt that. That there was just a point at which when we came to discuss crucial decisions. It, that was the only question on the table.

• 32:02Shane Parrish?

  I like how that frames the debate. Uh, in terms of everybody might see things differently, but they're all coming at it from almost the same intent.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and everybody wanted what was best for the business. Well, that was the, you know, the working assumption, and I think generally speaking, it was true. But it's not, you know, it's not about me, and it's not about sucking up to me. And I think that, you know, this is another very kind of recurrent theme in my work, which is, you know, power is incredibly disruptive. And you have to be very wary of it. Um, and try super hard not ever to have to use it.

• 32:45Shane Parrish?

  Let's talk a little bit more about your work and, um, selective blindness, or what you call willful blindness. Can you define what you mean by that concept? What's the difference between blindness kind of in hindsight and blindness that could or should have been seen in real time?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so willful blindness is a legal term. And I first encountered it when I was writing two plays for the BBC about the collapse of Enron. And in the trial of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, the judge, Simeon Lake, uh, referred to it in his summing up to the jury. Um, and he described it as, uh, if there are things that you could have known and should have known and somehow managed not to know, the law deems that your ignorance has been a choice, and you're responsible for the choice that you made. And so when I was writing that book, you know, the critical determinant for the for the cases that I chose

• 33:41Speaker 01

  was there had to be ample evidence that the information that was ignored was easily and freely available. So, for example, um, at one point I thought of looking at the case, and I'm going to forget his name. There was a horrible case of a of a man in Austria who had kept his daughter locked up in a basement for years. And raped her repeatedly and had a child by her and so on. And I thought, and meanwhile, his wife was and the rest of his family was living upstairs. And I thought, is this a case of willful blindness? And um, as unpleasant as the case was, I read through,

• 34:25Speaker 01

  you know, everything I could find about it. And I determined that actually it wasn't knowable, that this is what was going on. And there was no evidence that anybody knew what was going on, in which case it was not willful blindness. It was just ignorance, right? So the the ignorance wasn't a choice. It was just nothing to go on. Whereas if you take, for example, what I wrote about the deep water, not deep water, uh, Texas City accident, the BP plant. There are years of consultant reports talking about how dangerous the site is.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  So, you know, that were commissioned by BP and sitting in filing cabinets in BP. So that was the really crucial defining characteristic of every case I looked at, which was, was it possible to know this? Because if it wasn't possible, it's not willful blindness.

• 35:23Shane Parrish?

  Right. What circumstances do you think lead to people being willfully blind? If if something is knowable, I mean, what's the core of selective or willful blindness in organizations? Is it it's too hard to face the reality the way it is, so we deny something instead? Or is there something that leads us to it?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Well, there are lots of different things. I mean, I think, um, so there are a whole, yeah, so there are a whole bunch of things. One is, uh, you know, we all have. Mental models of how the world works. We have to, because we couldn't make sense of the world, otherwise if every day we started afresh. And the problem with with mental models, also business models, also economic models, is they attract confirming data and they repel marginalized or trivialized disconfirming data. Mm hmm. Um, so our, you know, what Alan Greenspan calls our ideology um, will be very useful in bringing to us um, information and prioritizing information that

• 36:31Speaker 01

  our model suggests is important. But it will fail to highlight the stuff that the mental model says doesn't matter. Um, we would like to think that it being the nature of organizational life that we're surrounded by um, people who are different from us and will therefore might come with us to come to us with a disconfirming piece of evidence. But of course, we are individually highly attracted to people just like ourselves. So we're most likely to be to choose to be surrounded by people who, roughly speaking,

• 37:12Speaker 01

  share the same mental models and therefore will see the same things that we see and not see the things that we don't see. So they may be sort of amplify our blindness. In addition, um, you know, there's this fabulous research on organizational silence by Morrison and Millican at uh, NYU that shows that people have issues and concerns at work, but they don't voice them either because they're afraid that they'll be labeled troublemakers. Yeah. Or um, it just, nobody will pay attention, so why bother? It's just more trouble than it's worth. And in addition to all that, of course, as human beings, we're very obedient.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  We're very conformist. We want to belong. And if we see something going wrong and nobody else is making a fuss about it, we will take cues from them and think, well, maybe it's okay. Maybe everybody else knows something I don't and it's all fine. And I think that there are characteristics of um hierarchy that exacerbate this. So I look up and see that my boss looks pretty happy. So I'm not gonna rock the boat because my job description for myself is keep the boss happy. Um, so I think hierarchy exacerbates it. I think bureaucracy exacerbates it.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  So I have a job description and I have twenty five KPIs and thirty seven targets. And none of those say if the house is on fire, call the fire department. So when the house is on fire, I don't call the fire department because I'm way too focused on my KPIs. And I can only think about one thing at a time and I'm already overwhelmed and I'm probably also quite tired. So you put all those things together and you can get Wells Fargo and Volkswagen and General Motors and the economic crash and so on and so forth.

• 39:14Shane Parrish?

  Uh, uh, what causes some people to buck that trend? Is it a personality trait? Is it something, um, a crusade? Is it, we've all, I mean, I've worked in organizations where there are some people who are, I would say relentless, uh, and they come from a good place, not malicious intent. But they're, they're constantly challenging the status quo and making sure that other people can't be, uh, blind to information. Um, what causes that to happen?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's really interesting and it's a very, very hard question to answer because, uh, you know, there's a lot of mythology around such people who are customarily described as whistleblowers, although that's quite a complicated term. Um, so there's a mythology that says they're mostly women and the research doesn't bear that out. There's mythology that says they're people of faith. The research doesn't bear that out. The only thing I could find, and I've interviewed hundreds of such people. Um, they tend to be a little nerdy. And I emphasize a little because, um. You know, not spectacularly, but they are definitely.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  People who like detail. And as a consequence of liking detail, they may be slightly better than average pattern recognizers. So they'll start to see things that will prompt questions.

• 40:46Shane Parrish?

  Hmm, I like that.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Um, and they're very good at doing, you know, this is how Hannah Arendt. Defined thinking, they're very good at having a conversation with themselves along the lines of hmm. What does that mean? Does it matter? If it mattered, what else might I see? Oh, I've just seen that too. Oh. That's tricky. So they're, and they're doing that all the time, you know, they're, it's not. It's not generally speaking, switched on by a problem. It's the way they experience life. So I think there's that. I think in general. And of course, there are always exceptions to this, but in general, such people.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Are deeply dedicated to the organization that they serve. So they want to protect it. They want, they do instinctively hold it to a very high standard. And so when they see lapses, they're quite concerned.

• 41:50Shane Parrish?

  That's incredibly counterintuitive because organizations often see those people as troublemakers or. Making things difficult for other people or slowing things down or a variety of other things.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I think that's true, but it's really interesting. Um, I was talking to the head of the British Army last week. And he said, you know, we now see that these people are helpful.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Because they may see things before we do and we need that. And I heard exactly the same thing from the chief executive of a big supermarket chain here in the UK. It had some um significant uh accounting issues leading to, you know, restatements of earnings and so on. And also some issues around food quality. So I think part of what has happened is that as we've come to understand that in the cases of willful blindness, there almost always are people who see it early. That actually if we would would not rush to get them fired or silenced, but instead

• 42:58Speaker 01

  have the kind of poise and courage to listen to them. They might represent a really outstanding early warning system.

• 43:07Shane Parrish?

  I think that's a a good way to look at it. Can we explore Enron a bit, which is something I know you've done a lot of work on and apply on. I know it's also not current news, but nothing we talk about really on Front of Street is current news. It's a story from business history that fascinates me as it kind of should for anybody.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 43:25Shane Parrish?

  What do you feel was at the core of Ken Lay's unwillingness to see and address reality there? Like, how did Enron more from a sort of boring, steady company almost for retirees into the corrupt, aggressive machine that it ended up becoming? And why do you think it wasn't stopped earlier by someone either internally or someone externally?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I mean, I could talk about this for hours.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Um, I think, I think Lay is a very, very interesting character. Um, partly because he's a preacher's son. He comes from a very, very poor background. Um, he is, I think, seriously quite a religious person. And I think he had a very strong sense of himself as morally a very fine person. Now, I know that could sound absurd. But I think, I mean, I have interviewed so many people who knew him. Um, who aren't necessarily defending, you know, Enlon at all.

• 44:34Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Um, but who will talk to this. Um, including his pastor in Houston. You know, who was rhapsodic about the effort Lay went to. To get um, public transportation in Houston so that poor people could get to jobs.

• 44:57Shane Parrish?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Um, so I think, you know, my, my theory about Lay is. That his sense of himself as a good person was so profoundly defended. That he could not conceive that his company could do bad things. And um, and I had a long conversation with um, Albert Bandura about this. Because of course Bandura's whole kind of life's work, it's about the degree to which. We have to think about ourself, think of ourselves as good people.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  And we will bend our experience of life to keep that sense of good self intact. And so I think that's what was going on with Lay. And of course, it's also important to remember when everybody. Says you're the greatest thing ever, um, and they surround you with um, praise and. Wealth and accolades, that's very seductive, right? Um, so that, I think, I think explains. Why he didn't see it. It doesn't explain why it went wrong.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Why did it go wrong? I tend to believe that that's more to do with skilling than with Lay. Though I may really be letting him off the hook here, you know. Skilling clearly did believe in social Darwinism to an extreme degree.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  And absolutely played on the competitive instincts of people in the company. And everything in the com- in the company culture was designed around this. Now, I think it's also true that N one was packed full of people who were very uncomfortable with what was going on. And I remember talking to um Sharon Watkins about this. And her saying, you know, it was, I think it was with Skilling that they decided to do a kind of Christmas show of The Wizard of Oz. You know, which is almost as big a clue as you could ask for, right?

• 47:15Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  That, you know, that this is all fake. So there's a kind of collective awareness there. And she also said something really interesting. She said she noticed a lot of people around her getting very overweight. And she wondered what was the emptiness they were trying to fill. In other words, they kind of felt something was wrong and they were overly driven to comfort themselves. And she talked also about, you know, private conversation that she had with people while working there about, you know, is this what happened in Germany? And so I think, you know, I mean Sharon's of course notable

• 47:59Speaker 01

  for having actually had the nerve to try to do something about it. Um, but I think, I mean, it, there's evidence that lots and lots and lots of people knew that it was going badly wrong. Now, I think, you know, Skilling, Skilling was a very intimidating character. Quite, you know, extraordinarily aggressive. So if people are afraid, which in a competitive environment like that they will be, and they have huge incentives to just shut up and deliver, they will. We know this.

• 48:33Shane Parrish?

  What can we do to avoid a similar fate?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's a great question. I think we have to be very humble about how fragile our sense of good and bad is. And, you know, Stanley Milgram wrote about this brilliantly. He talked about how when we go into an organization, our moral focus shifts, essentially from wanting to be a good person to wanting to do a good job. And we implicitly assume that doing a good job is doing what we're told. And there's much in our organizational life

• 49:22Speaker 01

  that creates, if you like, a sort of special identity for us. The person you are at work is not identical to the person that you are at home, which also is probably not entirely consonant with the person you are on the golf course or, you know, in the, on the baseball pitch. You know, we, identities are not as absolute and fixed as we used, once to imagine. And so we have to be very alert to how we change in different environments. And pay attention to what we leave behind

• 50:07Speaker 01

  and what gets amplified. And it's, um, I mean, I think it's a very hard problem. I, I work on a thing here in England called the Responsible Leadership Program, where, you know, we work very hard with senior executives to try to alert them to the dangers that exist in organizational life, not because the organizations are bad, but just because there are organizations, right? Um, and obviously some are more dangerous places to work than others, but the assumption that you're just, you know, that that the assumption that can lay made, if you like,

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I'm a good person and therefore nothing I do can be bad. That's just not safe.

• 50:58Shane Parrish?

  I think that's a a good place to end the discussion on Enron.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  And we'll have to have an Enron.

• 51:05Shane Parrish?

  I think so. Yeah, we could definitely do an episode. We could just dissect that case.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  I know, but it's really funny because I remember talking to Frank Partnoy and he said, you know, uh, it was when he was teaching corporate finance at University of San Diego. And he said, you know, most of his students have never even heard of it.

• 51:22Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's so sad.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  And he came and we were joking. And he said, you know, what we need is we need a desk calendar of business catastrophes because otherwise everybody forgets.

• 51:34Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, and you're doomed.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  And then we just repeat the stuff.

• 51:36Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. I I want to hit on maybe a bit of a touchy subject and switch a little bit more to some personal questions. The intersection of a couple of things that you've written about a lot is seemingly coming into the forefront now. So women in the workplace and this co- this concept of willful blindness that we've been talking about. Do you think that the massive list of kind of previously unreported sexual harassment coming to the forefront is sort of a prime example of people having turned a blind eye for all of these years? And what has watching this unfold meant to you personally?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting. Um, absolutely. It's an epic example of willful blindness. And in fact, off the back of that, my publishers have just commissioned an updated edition of the book.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Um, you know, and not only because of that, because obviously there are many cases that have occurred, you know, high profile cases that have occurred since the book came out. But all this, this is really an just an epidemic, right? So why? Um, also, I became very uncomfortable at one point a couple of weeks ago where, you know, people were just quitting left, right and center and I. I felt like it was watching um a production of The Crucible.

• 52:57Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And I talked to a friend of mine who's a lawyer and and just said, you know, what's going on here? This, you know, it makes me uncomfortable that this is getting such a head of steam. And she said, well, Margaret, these individuals are being fired now because the companies have been keeping dossiers. They all knew, but as long as they could get away with it, these high profile people are delivering real business value. And they're able to fire these people very quickly because they have the information.

• 53:34Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  I hadn't either, and it made me feel a little more comfortable, although, you know, there's nothing about this that should really make anybody terribly happy, except that maybe now it'll stop or at least reduce. Um, so the first, you know, the first chapter in Willful Blindness is about bias. And of course, you know, we inhabit a business environment that is, was built by men for men in their own image and not surprisingly favors men. Um, and I think that concentration of power is always dangerous. And I think everybody's biased, you know, the biology suggests that everybody's biased.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  And so when you have one group that basically holds power with bias in all of them, you are going to get what economists call perverse outcomes. Now, you can look at it a different way, too. Um, when I wrote my first book about women's corporate careers, um, I thought a lot about power. And how, because, and and the reason I thought about it was because so many women said to me they didn't really like the idea of power. And I always thought, really? How are we gonna get anything done?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Without it. And I think what I concluded was that it isn't that women don't like power at all. But that we think of it differently. So many of the very, very successful women I interviewed for that book and for my second book, which is about the rise of female entrepreneurship, Women on Top.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Thought of power as orchestration.

• 55:28Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  The power to bring people together to do collectively what they couldn't do alone. I think there is another concept of power, which is about domination. And I think that's specifically the kind of power which women were saying they rejected. And I think there are certainly many organizations, many corporate cultures, where power is about domination. And in those environments, the kind of harassment and intimidation that we've seen is possible. And, you know, harassment is an abuse of power. It happens because people have power over others.

• 56:14Shane Parrish?

  Do you think we're about to see a lasting change?

• 56:19Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think, um, I guess I have two questions. One is, will it all blow over and everybody think, oh, thank God, that's it. We can go back to business as normal, whatever that is. And I have a second question, which is, will it trickle down? Which is, I remember interviewing a young woman who worked in a car showroom, talking about sexual harassment, you know, so this is, not a famous young woman working in not a famous place for not a famous boss. And my question is, will her life, her working life, get better?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Because if it doesn't, then this isn't good enough, right?

• 57:10Speaker 01

  And I really don't know. I mean, it certainly feels, and I know everybody's saying it feels like a real. Um, see change. And I would really love to think that it is, but I think for the, for it to have lasting impact. Requires more than heads rolling. It requires a. You know, as, as well as the kind of negative, let's get rid of this. It requires a positive, which is. What is the concept of power that replaces it?

• 57:43Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  And whether that will take root. I don't know. And how far this is actually. Displacement activity.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Um, because some people in power can't be removed. I don't know. I really hope it marks the beginning of something quite different, but it's way too early to tell.

• 58:09Shane Parrish?

  I share your hope.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it just beggars belief that women go into work and get underpaid and physically intimidated. You know, and people are saying, well, it really makes a difference to guys if they have daughters. You know, then they take this stuff seriously. And I find myself thinking, well, don't they, any of them remember that they all had mothers?

• 58:33Shane Parrish?

  Yes.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I mean, really. You know, there's, you know, the notion that, well, we didn't really get it till we had daughters. It just feels very lame to me. But clearly. It's. You know, clearly we are very, very, very trapped. In our biases. I remember hearing um Sachin Nadella talking about, you know, the terrible gaffe he made at the Grace Hopper. Conference for women in computing when asked about um the gender pay gap. And a year later, he was talk, still talking about what an eye opener the, the blowback had been. And how his mother and his wife had talked to him about.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Had he not seen how hard it had been for them.

• 59:20Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  You know, Nadella is a very thoughtful. Sensitive human being. And he'd somehow missed this. Which suggests that. You know, we are very, very trapped in our own biases.

• 59:37Shane Parrish?

  Hopefully, we can help people step back and get a little more perspective and context in the sense that we can learn about some of these things within enduring progression.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  I certainly hope so. I certainly hope so.

• 59:51Shane Parrish?

  What are the the most important things you've learned over your career that are perhaps not well appreciated by others?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Oh, golly. What have I learned? Have I learned anything? Sure, I have somewhere. I mean, the difficulty with learning, if it's any good, is it just becomes part of who you are and then you forgot that you didn't always have it, right?

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  It's like it's hard for us to remember what life was like before we knew how to read. I think certainly the thing of not taking argument opposition personally, really fundamental. I think carrying with me this sense that I could always be wrong is really fundamental.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  You know, there's just this great question, you know, if I were wrong, what would I see? That really is kind of in my bloodstream now. And some of that's, you know, because I because I there have been times when I have been wrong.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  I think something that I have really toyed with a lot, and I think many people do, which is, when do I really dig my heels in and when do I let things go? So to take that out of the abstract, there was a time I produced a monster global co-production for the BBC. And it was for all kinds of reasons, you know, logistically ridiculously complex. And among other things, it involved a number of live broadcasts from Paris. And I'd never done a live broadcast before in my life. And I'm generally really up for things that are hard and that I've never done before.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  But on top of all the other programs I was producing, this is just kind of way, way too much. And I remember going to my boss at the time and saying, I have no expertise, I have no experience, I don't think it plays to my strengths. I'm absolutely drowning in the ten other programs I'm responsible for, I need help. And um, and he put his arms around my, he put his arms around my shoulder and said, Margaret, the only problem you have is you're just not confident enough. And um, and I thought, well, I guess he's right. I mean, I'm not that confident.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  So maybe I can do it. And I mean, to, you know, to cut to the chase, this is some of the worst programming ever seen on BBC television. It was a catastrophe. And I look back on that and think, he was wrong to say that and not to hear what I was saying. But I was wrong to let him do that. I should have said, no, actually, I cannot do this. I just, I'm at my limit. No. And so that's, you know, I think that those are very hard calls to make. At what point is this a stretch goal? And at what point is this madness?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  So, and you know, so, so I think, I think that's something I've learned the hard way. I mean, we always learn things, you know, the hard way.

• 1:03:12Shane Parrish?

  Do you have a process for reflecting on your failures that enables you to learn from them?

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Well, um, I don't think I have a process. I think, I'm very, very interested in mistakes. Um, and I'm very ready to acknowledge them when they occur. Partly because I want people who work with me to feel that it's completely safe to do so, and they won't unless they see me do it too.

• 1:03:39Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Um, so I think because I've all, I've felt that for quite a long time. I'm very comfortable acknowledging to myself, wow, you really screwed up there, Margaret. And I will then, pretty quickly sit down and try to think about, okay, how did this happen? So let's not say it was a fluke. It might have been a fluke, but let's assume it wasn't a fluke. What were the things leading up to it that caused this to happen? And can some of those things be changed?

• 1:04:12Shane Parrish?

  Um.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Um, and sometimes, you know, the answer is no, actually. Everything went right, you just blew it.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Uh, but mostly you can see, you know, that there were just, there was no margin for error, there wasn't enough margin for error, or. I was be, you know, working too hard to please, or I didn't spot some early warning signs, or. You know, the classic mistake I made more than once was. I thought I could do it for less money than I could, or I could do it with fewer resources than I could. Um, so I, I guess, you know, I don't tend to think this is. A judgment on me, this is Margaret, are you a good person or not? I tend to think, what could you learn from this?

• 1:05:06Shane Parrish?

  I think that's a good way to look at it.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  And, you know, and I was very lucky because my chief investor once said to me, you know, Margaret, I don't mind you making mistakes. I'm just gonna be seriously pissed off if you make the same mistake twice, because that's gonna show you weren't paying attention. And I thought that was terrific. So I said, okay, my promise to you is I will make different mistakes every time.

• 1:05:28Shane Parrish?

  That's a good promise. Well, what sort of things do you read? Like, what's on your nightstand right now?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, um, all sorts of things. I read fiction in the summer, or when I'm not writing. I mean, I read fiction mostly in the summer because I think it's just good for me, good for my brain. Um, I'm trying to think, when I'm looking around my office, what am I reading? I'm reading a book called The Curse of History at the moment. Analogies at War is another book I'm reading. Um, so I'm reading quite a lot of history at the moment. Uh, and I always read a lot of history, that's fair to say. There's a book across my desk on Thomas Becket. Um. So I read a lot of history, I read a lot of fiction, I read quite a lot of poetry.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Um, I read quite a lot of history of art. Um, I read ve- a very, very few business books.

• 1:06:24Shane Parrish?

  Has it always been that way, or is that uh just as you've grown in life?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  I think it's always been this, that way. I read a lot of biography. I'm looking across my office at a fantastic double biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, the mother and daughter. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I, um. I do read some business books, but I read very few, um.

• 1:06:52Shane Parrish?

  What's your process for reading a book? Are you, are you somebody who picks it up and goes cover to cover non-stop? Do you flip around? Do you look at the outline? How do you actually consume the book?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Well, it depends. If I'm reading it as I think of for work. Um, I'll read it quite fast. Um, I'll generally read it, um, on my iPad and I'll annotate it quite carefully. If I'm not reading it, you know, with a specific purpose in mind. I'll read in a much more leisurely fashion, um, and I'll quit if I don't like it. Um, I care a lot about how things are written. Um, I mean, a couple of months ago, I was reading Lionel Fryer's book, The Mandibles, and it. Stopped me in a tra- in my tracks because there was just a wonderful sentence in it.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  And I thought, oh, wow.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Wow, she, this is really good writing. Um, so I, you know, somehow subliminally paying attention to that kind of thing. Um, I read quite a lot of, um, stuff by dead writers. Uh, so I read a lot of nineteenth century fiction, early twentieth century fiction. I read a lot of old books. I mean, they're, you know, a couple of months ago, I was reading Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. Which is not at all what I thought it was gonna be. I'm very interested by. You know, how much great stuff there is that we think we know what it is, but we're wrong.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Uh, the same happened when I read um. When prophecy fails, which is Festinger's wonderful book in which he. Comes up with the theory of cognitive dissonance and it's. I mean, I think it's kind of a hilarious read because it's clearly a scholarly piece, but you know, the whole situation is so absurd. That the contrast between academic writing and this insane situation is just kind of. Accidentally hilarious.

• 1:09:02Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Um, and I definitely read what I think of as car crash business books. Um, you know, so books about businesses that go wrong. And I read some books about, you know, kind of happy ending business books. So American Icon, I really enjoyed about the turnaround at Ford.

• 1:09:21Shane Parrish?

  That was a good book.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought it was a really good book and it was fascinating because I was at Ford last week and. And so talking to people there and thinking about what's happened in the in between times, you know, it's really helpful. And the conversation I had was having with Frank Parknoway about, you know, the business catastrophe desk calendar. Was very much because we both lamented the degree to which. Business people often have very little sense of history. And um, and history is almost never taught in business schools. It's all the live case studies. Um, or the case studies, you know, where the ending is known. And therefore implicitly structurally looks predetermined.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Um, and I just, I just think that having a sense of what the longer story is is really important.

• 1:10:15Shane Parrish?

  I agree with that. You've led a varied life. You've been involved with so much over time. Was there any grand design behind it? Or were you just putting one foot in front of the other? What would you say to a young person who wants to follow in your footsteps?

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Well, definitely no, absolutely no grand design. Um, absolutely none. Um, I, I mean, I've definitely experimented with lots of things. I think, um, so my advice, you know, to my kids is try stuff. Try stuff um and whatever you're gonna try to do, try to do it with the with people who do it at a really high level. So just try to work with people who you think are really serious about what they're doing. So don't mess around. Um if you're going to do it, do it with the very best people you can find. Because even if you then decide, actually, this is not my thing.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  You will have been exposed to high quality thinking or high quality doing.

• 1:11:18Shane Parrish?

  Yep.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  And that's just always more interesting. I mean, it's interesting because my both my kids went to a a school here in England, which um is notable for being a really outstanding music school. But they didn't specialize in music and and what was interesting, and they said this to me, is the music in the school is so outstanding, it just gives you a sense of what excellence is.

• 1:11:48Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  And I thought that was a really good way of putting it.

• 1:11:51Shane Parrish?

  Super insightful, yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, um so I would say, you know, try stuff, but try stuff done as well as you can find it. And um contribute as much as you can, so be generous. Uh be curious, be reliable. I think reliability is the most undervalued characteristic. Um if you say you're gonna do something, do it, no matter what.

• 1:12:21Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Um and be, you know, be interested in other people. Because they are all interesting, no matter who they are, they're interesting. It's up to you to find what's interesting in them, but it's in there somewhere.

• 1:12:35Shane Parrish?

  That's what I tell my kids, you can learn something from everybody. Your job is to be a detective and kind of like find out or uncover what that is.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that must be the fun thing of what you're doing now, which is being able to have wonderful conversations with people.

• 1:12:51Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, and you're definitely facilitating that.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you're facilitating that too, you know.

• 1:12:58Shane Parrish?

  Thank you, yeah. Um, where can people find out more about you?

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Uh, my website, which is just www.mheffernan.com and um, that's the best place to look.

• 1:13:09Shane Parrish?

  Awesome. Um, thank you, Margaret, so much.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Find out very much about me for the next nine months because I'm not doing any more speaking engagements because I can get my head down and write something different.

• 1:13:21Shane Parrish?

  Well, I look forward to when that comes out.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  So do I.

• 1:13:25Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much for agreeing to come on the Knowledge Project. This has just been an absolutely wonderful conversation.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Well, I've enjoyed it and um, and Adam said I would, so I appreciate you making the time for it and asking such great questions because I do often think it takes a lot more to come up with a good question than to come up with a good answer.

• 1:13:48Shane Parrish?

  I don't know if that's true, but we definitely try to come up with um, interesting questions that we can ask people that we haven't heard before on their interviews. And the process that we use for the podcast is uh, very labor intensive and time consuming in the amount of work that we put into a show.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Hmm, but preparation's everything, isn't it? Right? It's not necessarily that it will go the way that you think, but if you're prepared, more interesting stuff will happen, I think.

• 1:14:18Shane Parrish?

  I a hundred percent agree with that. So that's why we we do kind of uh, what we do. I don't know how people put out shows like every two weeks where we we struggle to kind of do one a month at this point.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  But it depends on what you care about, doesn't it? Do you want to do a huge amount of stuff or do you want to do something really well?

• 1:14:35Shane Parrish?

  Oh, exactly, yeah.

• 1:14:41Shane Parrish?

  Hey, guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes from today's show at fs.blog/podcast. You can also find out information on how to get a transcript there. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to fs.blog/newsletter. The newsletter is all the good stuff I've found on the internet this week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Lastly, if you enjoyed this or any other episode of The Knowledge Project, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. Every review helps us make the show better, expand our reach, and share our message with more people. And it only takes a minute. Thank you for listening and being part of the Farnum Street community.