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Harvard Business Review
30-04-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
Introducing a New Era of HBR IdeaCast
Skip to content April 30, 2025 A new sound is in store for the HBR IdeaCast . Every Tuesday, we'll keep giving you the insights, research, and advice you need to lead, featuring practical conversations with leading thinkers. But as Adi Ignatius, editor-at-large at Harvard Business Review, joins executive editor Alison Beard as cohost of the show, we're offering even more to better serve you. Look forward to more interviews with C-suite executives, more expert perspectives on the most pressing, up-to-date problems facing leaders, and some special surprises for HBR subscribers. The new and improved HBR IdeaCast kicks off next Tuesday, be sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Tell us what topics you'd like us to cover: ideacast@ ALISON BEARD: Hey, guys. It's Alison Beard, executive editor at Harvard Business Review and for nearly seven years, host of this show, the HBR IdeaCast . ADI IGNATIUS: And I'm Adi Ignatius. For 16 years, I was the editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, and now I'm an editor-at-large and joining HBR IdeaCast as the new cohost. ALISON BEARD: With Adi joining us, you can look forward to all of the same HBR IdeaCast content you love, ideas, research, and hard evidence you need to lead. We'll continue our focused, practical conversations with world-renowned thought leaders. ADI IGNATIUS: But we also want to keep changing and evolving and making sure we're serving you, the best and brightest leaders and managers out there, with the information that you need. So that means bringing you even more interviews with C-suite leaders to share what they're really doing behind the scenes. ALISON BEARD: More expert advice around the most pressing problems you're facing in your organization today. From tariffs to AI to talent retention. ADI IGNATIUS: You'll see us pop up more often on your favorite video and social platforms like YouTube and Instagram. ALISON BEARD: Plus, there will be some special surprises in store for Harvard Business Review subscribers. ADI IGNATIUS: Check out the new and improved HBR IdeaCast , same time, same place every Tuesday. Hit subscribe and follow the show on your favorite podcast app and tell us what topics you'd like us to cover. Just email us a note at IdeaCast@ ALISON BEARD: HBR IdeaCast , where we offer insights and inspiration to make you a better leader. See you next week.
Harvard Business Review
30-04-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
How to Bring Out the Best in Your Team
HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Leadership , case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts—hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei says the best measure of a leader's effectiveness isn't their charisma, vision, communication skills, or resilience. Actually, it's their ability to, as the tagline of this podcast suggests, bring out the best in those around them. Helping your team grow, elevating their talents, and keeping them engaged all starts with trust. In this IdeaCast episode from 2020, Frei talks to host Alison Beard about how to build that trust and, ultimately, help your team thrive. Frei starts by breaking down the three main components of trust. ALISON BEARD: So if trust is the starting point for good leadership today, how do you build it with employees? FRANCES FREI: Great question. And our big breakthrough came when we realized that building trust is a monolithic thing. It's super hard, in fact, close to impossible, for most of us. But when we found that trust had three component parts, that was helpful, and then also found that each one of those component parts are actionable. So we can actually build more trust tomorrow than we have today by diagnosing which component part is in the way and then coming up with a custom solution for that particular part. ALISON BEARD: So what are those three pieces? FRANCES FREI: The language we use is that its authenticity, logic and empathy. Which will feel a lot like those that have read Aristotle, feel a lot like logos, pathos and ethos. But what it really is that, do you sense that it's the real me talking to you? Or do you feel like I'm only bringing part of me, or I'm delivering a message perhaps that I don't really believe in, but I think I'm supposed to say. So is it the real me with sound and rigorous logic, and that I'm in it for you? If you question any of those three, the first thing to go is trust. ALISON BEARD: So you said that there are ways to improve on all of those fronts. Let's start first with authenticity. You know it can sometimes feel risky to show your full and total self at work. How do you get leaders to move into a more authentic mode? FRANCES FREI: What you're thinking about with leaders, leaders have two jobs right. One is to be authentic themselves, but the other is to create the conditions for other people's authenticity to show up. Because as a leader, my job is to enhance the performance of other people. What I have to do is make sure that people feel safe to be their authentic self. Regardless of the difference that I represent, I feel welcome. And then it starts getting really exciting. Because of any difference I represent, I'm celebrated and then I'm cherished because of it. each one of us can bring our authentic self, we get to make much more robust decisions and we get to include many more people. The challenge is for anyone of us, how do we do it? So, let's say that I'm, so I am a woman over 50 lesbian. Puts me in a couple of categories. If I was tempted not to bring my authentic self in any of those three categories, it's a leader's job who feels comfortable on age, sexuality, gender, to set the conditions for my authenticity to bloom. Note where your authenticity really shines. Like what triggers your most authentic version to show up? It's really hard to be authentic when you're reading a script for example. ALISON BEARD: So let's move onto the logic piece of it. How do you establish your credibility on that front? FRANCES FREI: So one part is, I'm not being very logical and I'm communicating that super clearly. Right. So that's, like, my logic is suspicious. The other part is, I actually have really good logic, but I'm struggling in the communication of it. So, is it substance – the real logic, or is it style – the communication? We find that it's far more often style than substance. There's two ways that we can communicate in the world. And one is using a beautiful storytelling technique where I take you on a journey, there's dramatic twists and turns, and then you ultimately get to the point. That's a beautiful way to communicate and it's lethal for a logic wobbler. Instead I would say flip it. Start with the point, even if it feels a little scary, and then give the supporting evidence. If I take you on a journey and you give me all of that context and you tell me all of your credentials and everything along the way, awesome if I stay with you to the end, but you can lose me at so many of the plot points. Start with the point, even though it feels artificial and then give the supporting evidence. ALISON BEARD: What do you do with the trickier problem of actually having flaws in your logic? FRANCES FREI: Yeah so, here the solution is even more straightforward. Which is, don't talk about things that you don't know well. ALISON BEARD: Makes sense. FRANCES FREI: I'm just going to pause for a moment for laughter. But so, I like, I draw a box and I say, this is what you know. And then I draw a circle in the box and say, this is what you're allowed to talk about. The temptation of course is that we talk about a circle that's much larger than the box. If we only talk about that which we know well, we won't have substance problems. ALISON BEARD: What about the third leg of trust, empathy? How do I build that as a leader? FRANCES FREI: In this one I would say that in the time of crisis, I normally say all three are important because if you don't have one of them you're, you don't have, you lose trust. But in a time of crisis, this is the one that is really important. And here's the thing about empathy. I have to be present to the needs of others in order to express empathy. If I am at all self-distracted with myself, it's about me and not about you. So when I'm in your presence, if I'm checking my email, or texting someone, I am not present to you. I'm multitasking between you and me. People will question my empathy immediately and trust is the thing that goes. The reason this is so important right now is that we're in a global pandemic. Everyone is going to be self-distracted right now. As a leader, when you're building trust, you can either be self-distracted or present to others. You can't do both at the same time. Put the oxygen mask on yourself as much as you need and I'm sure it's more now than it was two months ago. But understand that when you're putting the oxygen mask on yourself, you're not leading and you're not building trust. So, perhaps be in front of people less often, but be fully present when you are. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. OK, so let's focus on the next piece of effective leadership, something that you call love. Which seems pretty touchy feely for the corporate world. So how have you seen it work in practice? FRANCES FREI: Yeah. So, trust is the foundation. And then the way that we think about this is that if I want to bring out the best in one other person, we figured out how to do that. And it requires two levers. So if I wanted to bring out the best in you Alison, what I would do is I would make sure that you felt really high standards from me, because it's hard for you to achieve your best in the absence of high standards. That's necessary, but not sufficient. The only way that's going to work is if you also experience my deep devotion to your success. So if you experience my high standards and my deep devotion to your success, that's when I can bring out the best in you and that's what we call love. But here's where the pesky human nature comes in. Most of us when we're setting really high standards for people, we shield them from our humanity. We don't display our intense devotion to their success. And so we get, we come across as chilly, or uncaring. And then the story goes that I get some feedback that I'm cold and I'm not, it's all about me. I get horrified, so then I rush to revealing that I'm deeply devoted and I accidentally insidiously lower the standards, as I show my devotion. And then I get really frustrated with the lack of performance that comes from that. And then I scramble back up into high standards, low devotion and a lot of us spend our lives going back and forth between those two states. What we call severity and fidelity. So the trick is, how do I simultaneously show high standards and deep devotion? ALISON BEARD: That sounds like something that could work in a family as well as an office. FRANCES FREI: Well so here's the great breakthrough we had. So a woman named Carol Dweck who's a wonderful family psychologist, a Stanford professor. She wrote something that gave us a total breakthrough on this. She wrote, there are two ways to parent and one of them is the right way. So then she goes onto say, and she wrote this, I'll use her dated language. She goes onto say, you can either prepare the path for the boy, or prepare the boy for the path. And it was a bolt of lightning. I had been preparing every path, real and imagined so that my boys could travel them. I had been a weed wacker of a parent. So deep in fidelity, so deep in devotion that I didn't even want them to have to do the work of mitigating any paths. And what she showed us is that, or you can prepare the boy for the path, so that he will be able to thrive in our absence. ALISON BEARD: So how exactly does a manager do that in a corporate setting? My belief in humanity is that we all really want to achieve and the greatest expression of love is for me to set the conditions for you to thrive. Someone's not thriving if they're just doing well enough. Like I think we all want to be better tomorrow than we are today. And it's a leader's job to set those conditions. ALISON BEARD: So, who's a leader that you've seen do this in action? FRANCES FREI: Oh, the best example of it is a man named Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor. To those who know him, and to everyone in Peru where he's from, he's a CRP. He believes in the possibility of people. Like he believes that the way to bring Peru from a third world country to a first world country, which he plans to do in his lifetime, is by setting the conditions for individuals to thrive. So he cares more about the development of individuals than any CEO I have ever seen. Ranging from, I go down to Peru every year and teach, and we teach a new set of leaders every year, he sits in every one of the classes and takes notes on the people. I've never seen a CEO do that. He sets super high standards for people starting with the recruiting process. If you want to get hired at, in one of the Intercorp companies, which people are, it's a very long line to get hired there. It's going to take a really long time. And if you try to use any informal mechanisms to do it like, oh I have a friend, can you talk to him? If he senses that you're trying to use your connections, trying to do anything to mitigate a meritocracy, he does what he calls, he puts you in the freezer. He gives you a time out. Because he wants everyone to realize that at Intercorp, it's the meritocracy that rules. But he's also deeply devoted to people. And I think he gets to set even higher standards than anyone else in the world, because he is so devoted to his people. One famous example is that he and his top team, he decided to give them a reward for having done a very good job. And the reward was to go climb a mountain right near Mt. Everest. And so, this will reveal, his other rewards are like you get to go to school. And because he cares, he doesn't care about status. He cares about meritocracy. So the top people that were most responsible for this, there were some that were wealthy by then. And so they bought business class tickets to get from Peru all the way to the mountain, which is a very long journey. The others that were the young scrappy people that they had coach tickets. And then just at the last minute, right, like the day before they were going to take off, Carlos asked who has business class tickets? Everyone else and me, will meet you there. I'm going to take them on my plane. Which is like, he just never misses a chance to show you that it's not how much money you have, it's not how much, like he's devoted and he really cares about meritocracy. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So this vision for leadership that you have from the very beginning, from the time that you're managing just one person all the way up, it seems to run a little bit counter to how people are noticed and rewarded in most organizations. You know, you're really sort of taking a backseat to your people and elevating them and their needs above your own. Is there a tension there? FRANCES FREI: I think that there, so yes there is. Because we, we sometimes get put into positions of leadership because we were a really good individual contributor. And then we form a team and we think well they're there to help us achieve even more. And so it's about me, me, me with more and more people. And it's, we find that that actually puts a pretty severe ceiling on what you can actually do which is that I'm thinking, how can I bring out the best in other people? So the second that I'm leading someone, it, how can I set the conditions for them to thrive? And I want there to be equal access to everyone thriving and I want more and more varied people to thrive. If I can do that, I will thump the team, that is, how can I get people to help me perform? ALISON BEARD: So that's a good transition from moving away from team managers to people leading larger groups and even organizations where they don't have day to day contact with all of their people. So how does someone like that make sure that everyone feels trust and love and a sense of belonging when they are absent? FRANCES FREI: The way to think about it is that if I can guide your discretionary behavior in my absence that's the whole game. So, you're making ten's, hundreds of decisions without my direct observation, even my direct knowledge. So if I can get you to make those decisions as well as if I was standing right next to you with my high standards and deep devotion and with our trust and you felt included, if I could get you to make those decisions as well as if I was right next to you, that's the whole ballgame. Because I can't be right next to you. There are two levers we have to guide discretionary behavior. And that's discretionary behavior in our absence. The first one is strategy. So usually we don't talk about strategy in a leadership book. I think it's essential for when people are in my absence, the strategy can help guide discretionary behavior. Go into a Walmart and watch 100 different employees confront the same situation and you will find 100 different employees do the same thing. Everyone at Walmart knows that their reason for being is on behalf of the customer so that they can make their lives more affordable. It's a disaster if you have 100 people confronting the same situation and there's a 100 different solutions. So when strategy is clear that takes a whole bunch of discretionary decisions off the table. It's surprising how many organizations the strategy isn't clear enough in the minds of everyone in the organization. Everywhere where strategy is silent, where strategy is not enough, that's where culture comes in. And culture is what describes to us how things are really done around here. I'm in a meeting and do I get to take up a lot of space or a little space? Strategy doesn't tell me that. Culture does. I'm junior at an organization. Is it my obligation to bring up any problems I have or should I do it more politely through the chain of command? Strategy doesn't tell us that, culture tells us that. So everything else for what's the way that things are done around here, that's the culture. Those are the only two levers that a senior person has for guiding, for leading in their absence. ALISON BEARD: You've been involved in some massive cultural transformations starting with your own organization, HBS. Tell me what you learned through that experience. FRANCES FREI: Yeah, so I think it starts with, culture change has to happen quickly. And so this is counterintuitive to most people. But meaningful change happens quickly or it doesn't happen at all. So if you're on a five year journey for a cultural change, I would just suggest you stop and use those efforts to do something else. So, meaningful change happens quickly and it's because otherwise you'll be sending mixed messages. Like I can change a culture when we're saying, changing the culture is the most important thing. So you should decide when you want to do it and then do it in an all in, and don't think oh, I'll change this part of the culture now and that part later, doesn't work. We have to do all of it now. That's the first thing. The second thing is make sure you have a really noble purpose and a really noble reason why you're changing the culture. What's the burning platform? If I didn't change the culture, what would be so bad about it? And in my experience, the easiest reason to change the culture is that we are, we are not living up to the dignity and humanity of a group of people. Whether its customers, suppliers, employees, there's some group of people who we have been systematically disadvantaging. And we're going to fix that. That's the easiest way to change a culture. There's like a burning platform, but about people so that we find it close to immoral that we've been doing it and now it's going to be the most important thing that we do. ALISON BEARD: And so, at HBS the concern was that it wasn't a welcoming environment for women. How did you quickly move to fix that? FRANCES FREI: Yeah so and that was, that was for students. And the burning platform that we had was that women had lower grades than men and women had lower self-reported satisfaction than men. Now, the truth is it gets talked a lot about in gender and I'll talk about it in gender. But it was also true for international students and domestic for LGBT. There were 12 categories because we collected a lot of data. We solved it for everyone in the same year. And here's the way to do it which is, one, make sure you have devastating data. It's best if the devastating data has to do with people. So, what is it that is like gnawing at you? So, for us it was achievement and sentiment. Women weren't achieving as well and they didn't have same self-reported satisfaction. So then we asked ourselves all right, what's getting in the way of achievement and sentiment for women? At HBS we grade on a forced curve. Half of every grade is class participation. It wasn't the grading difference, it wasn't in exams. It was really in class participation. And then when we went and double clicked on that more, it was that women were getting a much slower start in class participation. So there's some people that would come into the HBS classroom and they'd feel so comfortable speaking from day one. So what we did is we had to unlock what makes good class participation, but we also had to set the conditions so that people could find their mojo, their super power early. So one of the things we did is introduce the field method. So the case method, been at HBS for, since it's, practically since its beginning and it's everything you can learn by talking about what you would do. But there's also quite a bit that you can do of learning by doing. And that's what we call the field method, which is we'll put you in small group, experiential settings. We did the field method before the case method so that people that would feel really great in small groups, if they were good at that, that confidence would spill over into the classroom. So one is that we created, we wanted more varied people to thrive. So we gave more varied ways to find your superpower. We got much closer to meritocracy. And the benefit of that was that men and women got the same grades, the self-reported satisfaction, the gaps closed and here's the really awesome thing. All of the gaps closed in satisfaction as an example and it got better for everyone. ALISON BEARD: And then you applied some of those strategies at places like Uber and Riot Games. What did you do there and what types of outcomes did you see? FRANCES FREI: Yeah so applied the same strategies and got the same outcomes. So, at Riot Games they were facing a pretty public crisis. It was in August of 2018. And it's like every senior team's worst nightmare. Everybody wakes up to an article that has all of these claims of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. And you just be like, oh my gosh, where have I been working that this has occurred? It's just a bombshell that goes off. Now, fast forward and much of what was written about in the paper by great journalists, much of what was written about, turned out not to be true. But some of what was written about was true. And so they had to do a complete refresh of this very culturally-driven organization. But the culture was now driving them unintentionally in the wrong direction. So what we did is looked at achievement and sentiment because that's the way we know to do this. And we found there to be enormous demographic tendencies associated with who was thriving. And so we set out to, we collected the devastating data and we set out to address those. We also in the cases of both Uber and Riot, they had really strong, cultural values that were each delineated. Like in one case there was 14 and in the other case there were six. So very culturally driven. And these cultural values were awesome. One of the famous ones at Uber was called toe stepping. And what it meant was that if you're a junior person and you have a good idea and you're being blocked by your manager, step on your manager's toes and go to their manager. Because we want great ideas to be surfaced, and that's what you want in a young company. Or one of them at Riot was default to trust. Well it turns out that over time, both of these had become weaponized. Toe stepping, instead of the junior person stepping on the toes going up, it was senior people stepping on the toes of going down. Default to trust, the same thing. Instead of when I'm explaining something to you and I want you to default to trust, so if I'm questioning you, default to trust so that like, understand that my questions are good and they're well intended. Instead I'm a senior person. You bring up a question and I'm like, look default to trust dude. Just do it. So you can see how, so the second a cultural value gets weaponized and cultural values, the more specific they are, the easier it is to get weaponized. As a cultural value gets weaponized, you got to take it out. There's no, and no matter how much you loved it, and founders have a really hard time with this. Oh, but it was good and it was well intentioned. There's no reversing it. So what we did in both cases is we got the entire, we invited the entire company to come up and author the new cultural values. Which is literally, you sit down with the old cultural values, you have a pen in hand and we all edit them together and then we talk about which of the cultural values would be super sad if we lost and why? And which are doing, which do we observe are doing real harm to other people and why? And then through that process we edited it and came up with new cultural values and these new cultural values are, because these are two strong cultural environments, the new ones got adopted super quickly because they were authored by everyone. ALISON BEARD: Frances, thanks so much for coming on the show. FRANCES FREI: Oh, I really loved it. Thank you for including me. HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School's Frances Frei in conversation with Alison Beard on HBR IdeaCast. Frei is the author of the book Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. When you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at This episode was produced Mary Dooe and me, Hannah Bates. Curt Nickisch is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Ian Fox, Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
Harvard Business Review
22-04-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
How Immigrant Entrepreneurs Build Lasting Businesses
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard. The story of the successful immigrant entrepreneur moving to a new country, seeing a need and working as hard as possible to build a business around it isn't a new one. In the U.S, it's a big part of what we call the American Dream. But the stats on this still might surprise you. While immigrants make up 14% of the U.S population, they own about a fifth of new businesses. 45% of Fortune 500 companies had immigrant founders. Four in five founders or top executives at billion dollar startups are first or second generation immigrants. And the research shows that immigrant founded companies grow faster and survive longer than those founded by natives, contributing trillions of dollars to the economies of their adopted countries. The most talked about immigrant founded U.S company might be Google, now Alphabet, but consider also Nordstrom, WhatsApp, Chobani, Calendly, Zoom, and thousands of other small to medium sized businesses across the country. Our guest today has talked to many of these entrepreneurs, studied their strategies and pinpointed the common principles that have propelled them to long-term success. She says that any leader can learn from their examples. And at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise around the world, we wanted to ask her what impact related policy changes might have on entrepreneurial innovation. Neri Karra Sillaman is an entrepreneurship expert at Oxford University, a founder herself of the luxury leather goods company, Neri Karra, and the author of the book, Pioneers, Eight Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs. Neri, welcome. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Thank you very much Alison. ALISON BEARD: So I'd love to start briefly with your own immigration story and how that led you to both study entrepreneurship and become an entrepreneur yourself. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: I was born in Bulgaria to a Turkish ethnic minority, and in June of 1989, the communist dictator, Todor Zhivkov, asked us to leave Bulgaria. So in June of 1989, with only two suitcases to our name, we left Bulgaria. There were 360,000 Turkish Bulgarians who immigrated that summer. When we got to the border, I remember all the confusion, fear around me, and I will never forget my father screaming like a wounded animal as he ran towards the border and he threw himself on what he called motherland soil. Looking around me at that time, I had two realizations. One was my childhood just ended. The second one was I need to get a good education. I received financial aid at the age of 18 to go from Turkey to University of Miami, and I was once again an immigrant. I remember feeling very much like fish out of water because all my classmates around me felt very much at ease when talking to the professor, very much at ease, comfortable in their own skin. We had a computer class and it was the first time that I saw a computer in my life. ALISON BEARD: And as you started studying entrepreneurship, as you continued your educational journey, what gaps did you find in the research on immigrant success? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: At the time, I was actually with my family, a few years later started to build a company ourselves. And the lessons that I was seeing in the literature, first of all as someone who wasn't just an academic, but also who was practicing entrepreneurship, some of the advice didn't fit what we were doing as a refugee family trying to build a business with zero capital and with very limited resources. What stood out to me was just how different it was, what you did on the ground versus what was written in the books and in the academic literature. For me, especially when it comes to immigrant entrepreneurship, for instance, there is a lot emphasis on necessity entrepreneurship. And it is the case for many of the immigrant entrepreneurs because they often don't have the resources, their education is not recognized in the country that they immigrate to, so they are often forced to become entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship literature will often ask the question, why are immigrants more likely to become entrepreneurs? But they rarely ask a question, why are they more likely to start businesses that last? ALISON BEARD: So why is longevity the key measure to consider for you? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: The majority of startups today fail, even the majority of businesses today last about an average of 18 years. As a refugee founder, immigrant entrepreneur, it was very important for me to create a business that will be prosperous, that will have longevity. I was fascinated to understand how iconic brands are made, for example. But as I start to delve deeper into the literature and into my research, I had to change the definition of longevity and reframe that because no company can last forever, is what I'm trying to say. So it's not so much about the fact that you are going to last for thousands of years but what impact are you making? ALISON BEARD: And a lot of the companies that you have studied are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively young. I'm thinking Calendly, Noom, WhatsApp, even Chobani. How do you classify them as long lasting companies at this stage? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: For me, business longevity is a company that has made an impact that has lasted long enough to create an impact in the ecosystem that it finds itself in. ALISON BEARD: And all those companies I just cited certainly have done that in their respective industries. So you looked at eight key principles that drive immigrant and also second generation entrepreneur's long-term success. Briefly, that's bridging cultures, building from the past forward and the future back, forging authentic connections, generating profit the right way, building community, reframing rejection, frying in your own oil and daring to play your hand. I have to start by asking you to explain the most interesting one. What does frying in your own oil mean? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: That's a wisdom from my grandfather. When we were growing up in Bulgaria, he was an orphan at the age of 15, had to look after his five brothers and sisters. He would always tell us it's very important to fry in your own oil, which means to be self-sufficient. So I work with a lot of start-ups, I advise businesses. What I was seeing especially was that they will try to immediately raise money and grow quite fast. That's almost like a trap that a lot of start-ups tend to fall into. And it can have devastating consequences. What advice can I give? It was that fry in your own oil; grow at a rate that also matches your profitability and you are self-sustaining as a company first because this will allow you to be a lot more creative. I think that's an important element when it comes to helping them building sustainable businesses of longevity. ALISON BEARD: And that seems linked to another principle, generating profit the right way. Why do you see this sort of dual pursuit of both purpose and financial success as something that immigrants might do better or more naturally than others? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Because of their backgrounds, they've usually come from countries with a lot of uncertainty. They've seen what lack of education, losing trust in institutions and having lack of resources, not having the right ecosystem can do not only to the people who live in that country, but even to the health of a business. I have a section in the book that says Milton Friedman's advice is no longer applicable because it's not about putting company profitability and company first, but recognizing that you are part of this ecosystem with suppliers, customers, the nature, you are all part this big ecosystem, and in order for you to be successful, all of these elements have to work together. ALISON BEARD: That links to yet another principle, this idea of clear vision. And you say that immigrants do that by moving from the past forward and the future back with three specific steps, identity, intention, and imagined future. So explain that process to me. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Founder of Moderna, Noubar Afeyan, he has a plaque on his desk that says trust your crazy idea. He claims one of his main elements is that he builds his businesses from the future back. But what does that mean? You have to have identity. Your past informs your future. One of the other entrepreneurs I interviewed, the founder of Numi Tea, she said, 'Entrepreneurs have to look within first, understand their past, where they come from, what bothers them and what they want to change and then look out there.' So I thought that was an interesting one and very much related to vision. So you have to first ask yourself what matters to you, what your values are. And intention has to do with the fact that what in the world doesn't align with your values? And then you have to have that crazy idea and trust in that crazy idea. And trust is the ability that allows you to keep going no matter what, and believing in that crazy idea. ALISON BEARD: And it's interesting because you think, okay, for an immigrant entrepreneur, they're looking back to their past, that involves migration, but any entrepreneur could look back to the past of things that they experienced in their childhood or a friend or family member who had a healthcare issue or even a consumer problem that they face on a daily basis and sort of use that past experience to inform their intention and imagined future. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: One thing I want to really clarify, in the book I talk about immigrant entrepreneurs, but like you said in the beginning of our conversation, this is very much applicable, replicable. It can apply to anyone who is not an immigrant entrepreneur. ALISON BEARD: Right. Another of the principles, the ability to bridge cultures seems like an obvious asset that immigrants bring to the table. How, though, does it really help them build these kinds of businesses you're talking about, the ones that have longevity? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: I put this principle first because it, in my opinion, underpins everything else. Immigrants see the world and look at the problem from a very different angle. They can look at a problem and ask a question that normally other people wouldn't ask. Another important element is the institutional distance because when they start building their companies, their cross-cultural ability allows them to reduce that institutional distance between doing business of two different countries. They can also start a business simply because they come from a different culture, as is in the case of Hamdi Ulukaya with Chobani. He comes from a Kurdish Shepherd family and he brought yogurt to U.S. ALISON BEARD: I eat it every day. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: It's a great product. And one thing I want to add here, founder of Wondery, Hernan Lopez, he's an Argentinian immigrant and he says coming from two different cultures allows you to read tomorrow's newspaper today. And that's about recognizing inflection points because they happen so often, especially in today's fast-paced environment, you can spot changes and you are able to adapt a lot faster than other companies would. ALISON BEARD: So it's almost like your experience with change and cultural differences allows you to anticipate a big cultural shift. And he, with Wondery, anticipated the rise of podcasts. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Yes, that's right. ALISON BEARD: tConnections is an interesting one for immigrant entrepreneurs because they typically don't have them. There's no existing support networks of family and friends when you've moved to a different country. So what lessons can non-immigrants take away from how they overcame that obstacle to build social capital anyway? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: It's very true. So when immigrants come to a new country, they often lose their family, their friendships, the social network that sustained them, and they try to immediately rebuild in any way they can these new connections. And every single connection matters a lot to them. That's why I have many of the principles, for example, homophilic ties, which is birds of a feather that flock together principle, community principle. And in the case of immigrant entrepreneurs, what I've seen is they established these ties in a very strategic way. Nothing is by accident. They use a lot of storytelling, they are very dynamic and they evolve over time, and there is a continuous nurturing of these relationships. ALISON BEARD: And I think we often, when we think of immigrant entrepreneurs, think of connections within that cultural group, but you cite examples of people connecting over heritage, experience and values as well as geographic background. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Absolutely. So again, you don't have to be an immigrant, you don't have to be a refugee in order to create this, what I call, quasi-family or create connections with other people. You can bond over the fact that you believe in the same thing or you have the same vision for your company. When you are building a company, you can take these elements and implement them yourself. ALISON BEARD: So that does lead right into community building. How do the entrepreneurs you study do it differently? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: They do it differently because the other person matters to them greatly. For instance, in the case of Hamdi Ulukaya, when he first started to build his company, he didn't have a lot of capital, but he had those other people who were part of the old craft factory. And he says, 'When I start to build my business, I ask those people, 'If you see me doing any mistakes, just tell me.'' So that's a very interesting one because there is not this cult of a leader, but rather a cult of a community. ALISON BEARD: So is this existing community of Americans that had worked in the craft factory and he was turning it into a yogurt factory, and he made that community his own? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: That's right. To this day, he hires refugees in his business, and that's a very important part of how he does business. It's based on community. It's based on how can I create better life for other people? ALISON BEARD: So let's try to quickly touch on the last two principles. How do immigrant entrepreneurs reframe rejection in a way that we can all learn from? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: That's one of my favorite principles. With immigrant entrepreneurs, they are expecting almost to be rejected. They expect failure and they are not afraid. Or to them it doesn't mean rejection. To them, the word no doesn't mean it's a rejection. Isaac Larian, the founder of MGA Entertainment, he constantly says no is the beginning of business. No is the beginning of negotiation. ALISON BEARD: Right. And I imagine that sort of the resilience that they've developed from moving countries, establishing entirely new lives, is a big part of that. Being able to recover. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Absolutely. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Finally, dare to play your own hand really is about capitalizing on luck. So how did the entrepreneurs that you talked to explain how they did that? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: When I was setting out to write the book, I thought I knew what I was going to say more or less, but my analysis led me to some very surprising principles and insights. So luck is one of them. Luck, again, it's quite strategic. It's linked to hard work. So it doesn't happen to you simply because you were there at the right time, met the right people. You may have these elements happen, but you need to know how to recognize it, and then you need to put in the hard work and utilize all the other principles I talk about such as cross-cultural bridging or homophilic ties or importance of community or reframing rejection. ALISON BEARD: Yeah, it's the ability to make your own luck in a way. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Absolutely. ALISON BEARD: Sort of create so many opportunities that there will be one you're able to seize on. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Yes. ALISON BEARD: So in reading the book, I did think of one very prominent counter example, particularly when it comes to achieving profitability the right way. One very famous business flame out recently was WeWork, which was founded in the U.S by an Israeli and had a spectacular rise and fall due to financial mismanagement. Is that just an anomaly or is there a danger that you're cherry picking the best immigrant entrepreneur case studies and ignoring those failures? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Of course. Every research, every study has its limitations and certainly mine does as well, but I want to emphasize what we can learn from immigrant entrepreneurs. Immigrant entrepreneurs are not monolith in any way. There are those who have failed, there are those who have done things that can be controversial as we are seeing today. So I'm talking Elon Musk here. But it doesn't take away from the fact that immigrant entrepreneurs are quite impressive, have built impressive companies, and as you cited in the beginning of our conversation, they make up 46% of the Fortune 500 companies and statistically, they build businesses that last longer. ALISON BEARD: And so we're talking now about lots of well-known companies. In general, the examples you cite are new companies, certainly, and some startups, but things we've heard of, Noom, Calendly, WhatsApp, etc. Do you see the same principles at work in all of the smaller immigrant-led businesses that we all see in our own communities? Are the same principles playing out? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Yes, they are. Also, when I was writing the book, I was comparing, contrasting these principles to my own lived experiences as an immigrant entrepreneur, and wanted to see how did this affect me? How did this play out in our business? But I went a step further than that as well because as I mentioned, for several years now, I've been working with startups, advising startups, and I wanted to see how do these principles work in their context? And I see it very much applies there as well. For instance, I can give you an example, fry in your own oil. A few years ago, which was a student of mine from Oxford became a financial advisor to a startup, so she would ask me very informally about that particular startup. So one thing I said to them, you are over-borrowing without being mindful of your sales. And unfortunately that company bankrupted, even though it was created with the right principles, they were clothing in Africa and contributing to the community in Africa, but if they were not careful with their finances… And it was a great idea, but over-borrowing without being mindful of your sales and your profitability, it's basically a death knell for the company. ALISON BEARD: So it's a good reminder that you can't just adhere to a couple of the principles, you need to work on adhering to all of them. What about intrapreneurs, the people creating new products or services within their organizations? Do you think that immigrants bring something special to the table there too as well? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: I think they do. This can apply to even people who are not entrepreneurs, who are not building businesses. For example, it can apply for your career as well, for early career professionals when they have a vision for their career, how they want to build their career. You can even apply it in that context. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. The best example of an intrapreneur that I found in your book was that the founder of Duolingo actually created CAPTCHA also when he was at Google. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Yes, that's right. ALISON BEARD: You say a few times in the book that you're not trying to make a political statement on immigration, but as I said in the intro, for the past several years, there are countries around the world that have seen increased anti-immigrant sentiment and they're electing leaders who are trying to limit immigration. In the U.S. right now, we are deporting university students, for example. So if that trend continues, what do you think that the long-term result will be for those countries that are less friendly to newcomers? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: It'll be devastating. You are right. I do say several times I'm not trying to make political statement in the book, and I don't want to even say I'm political because this is just simply being a human being. I want us to go beyond the divisive rhetoric when it comes to the world, immigrants and immigration, because statistics do not lie. Numbers do not lie. And if we continue with this, we are already seeing people don't want to come to U.S. There are travelers who are boycotting, students who are not likely to choose U.S. And entrepreneurship at the end of the day needs stability. They need ecosystems that are going to nurture these startups. When you have this constant disruption, while disruption is something that immigrant entrepreneurs are familiar with, you need the right soil in order for the flower to grow, let's say. The founder of Udemy, Eren Bali, he immigrated from Turkey to U.S specifically because he knew that he cannot grow Udemy in Turkey. He wanted the ecosystem of the Silicon Valley. ALISON BEARD: So which countries would you say are the best environments for would-be immigrant entrepreneurs right now? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: A lot of them we are seeing them already. Europe, Singapore, Berlin, we have Paris. We are seeing actually the governments quite mindfully trying to offer the right conditions for entrepreneurs. ALISON BEARD: And how would you respond to the argument that immigrants, whether they're workers or entrepreneurs, are taking opportunities away from native-born citizens? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: They do not. Again, they do not. And again, numbers, we have statistics and numbers of… They pay taxes. They are contributing to the country that they immigrate to. This is incredibly important for them. We see it in the businesses that they create, we see it in the everyday lives. And yes, you can take a few examples. If you want to create your political rhetoric and say, 'Oh, they've done this in an unlawful way,' but ultimately what statistics and what facts show us that immigrants build and make America great. ALISON BEARD: And other countries too. They're creating more jobs than they are taking. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Completely. ALISON BEARD: Certainly from the economy. Yeah. So in conclusion, you talk about kindness being a unifying theme for all of your principles that you derived from your research on immigrant entrepreneurs. Why is kindness something that you see more in those study subjects and why do you want more of that in business? NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: Because it's, for me, what unifies all the principles that I talked about. Without kindness, you cannot practice community. Without kindness, you cannot reframe rejection. You have to be kind to yourself too. Without kindness, you can't give back. And for me, it's the secret ingredient that allows for everything else to happen. ALISON BEARD: Well, you've offered us lots of lessons, and that final one is a good one to end on. Neri, thanks so much for being with me today. NERI KARRA SILLAMAN: It was my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. ALISON BEARD: That's Neri Karra Sillaman, an entrepreneurship expert at Oxford University, entrepreneur and author of Pioneers, Eight Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs. And we have more than a thousand IdeaCast episodes, plus many more HBR podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at slash podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast . We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Beard.
Harvard Business Review
09-04-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
When One of Your Employees Is Working Against You
HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Leadership , case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts—hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Some employees don't just cause problems—they create them on purpose. Subversive employees manipulate office politics, undermine colleagues, and make themselves look indispensable—all while frustrating the people who actually see what's happening. So what can a leader do? In this episode of Dear HBR:, hosts Dan McGinn and Alison Beard tackle this tricky leadership challenge with Adrian Gostick, coauthor of Leading with Gratitude . They explore how to expose subversive behavior, make a compelling case to senior leadership, and set up systems that prevent manipulation. Here's Adrian, explaining why expressing gratitude to a subversive colleague should be the first step to getting to the bottom of their behavior: ADRIAN GOSTICK: There's some reason why somebody is being subversive, and the best thing for any leader to do is to start with positivity, start with the carrot versus the stick. Now, I'm not saying you won't get to the stick, but you always try to understand where somebody is coming from, why they may be acting the way they are, and you begin by valuing who they are, and you begin by identifying the good things they're doing versus just beating them up for the things that may be wrong. ALISON BEARD: That can be really hard though once an employee is making things difficult for you day after day after day. How do you begin to address those problems even if you're coming at it with an attitude of positivity? ADRIAN GOSTICK: It sounds like you have had some experience there, Alison, I can feel. It's true. There are difficult employees, and then there are toxic employees. The difficult we all have, and they can still make our lives miserable, and we have to find ways as leaders to work with them. Whereas those toxic employees, those are the ones where yeah, we do have to take a firmer, more disciplined approach in our leadership styles. ALISON BEARD: Dear HBR: I manage an IT system administrator and help desk employee who creates problems, then resolves them to make himself look to senior executives. For example, he'll set up a laptop for a new VP of sales but somehow misconfigure the VPN. Then when the VP calls about it, he'll act like it's a big issue, and show that he's working day and night to fix it, so the VP thinks he's so dedicated and supportive. He'll email at night and give out his personal mobile number instead of the general help desk number. Meanwhile, when he thinks an employee is insignificant, the case will sit for weeks before he helps them. He's one of only two system administrators, and once a case is assigned that person owns it until it's resolved. When I do spot reviews of cases and catch him doing this, I've warned him that he shouldn't be having problems after standard set-ups, but he just moves on and creates different kinds of fires. I'm unable to get rid of him, he has too many backers in management. He's been with the company for more than ten years and has systemically cultivated their support by doing these kinds of things. What can I do? ADRIAN GOSTICK: When I was listening to this, I had flashbacks because I had this employee. I had a guy, I'll call him Sam, who Chester, my coauthor and I, we had hired years ago when we were working together in a corporate environment. And the problem was like this, clients loved him, the senior leaders loved him, and his teammates thought he was the worst human being who ever lived. And he would be on the road a lot, and when he came in, he would actually just make rounds from each of the executive offices, pretty much spend the whole day out schmoozing with the executives, his teammates couldn't get anything out of him, we couldn't get anything out of him. When we complained to our boss, the CEO about him, he'd say work around him, he's a great guy, clients love him. Just could not get him, we couldn't help our senior leaders understand that this guy was really a challenge. And the team didn't like him. ALISON BEARD: So, what did you do? ADRIAN GOSTICK: Thankfully on this one, he ended up shooting himself in the foot, and finally ended up showing his colors. But that doesn't always happen. And there's a very good chance if this guy here has been doing this for ten years, this system administrator, he's not going to get caught, he's just going to keep doing this. And so, when you have this happen you've got to start working the senior leadership yourself, you've got to be a little political yourself, and a lot of leaders hate doing that. DAN MCGINN: I thought this was a fascinating letter and a fascinating problem. I'm naïve, I didn't think that people would do this kind of thing. We've been doing the show for a couple of years now and I don't think I've used the word diabolical. It's evil, but it's really cleverly evil. It reminded me of that cartoon that was on when I was a kid, there was that theme song, here I come to save the day. He creates a problem, and then he sort of swoops in, and sweats, and works hard, and solves it. I can see how annoying this would be to be his boss, but as a game goes, man, he's found a way to score the system. ALISON BEARD: It's interesting, Adrian, that you start with the idea of explaining to senior leadership exactly what he's doing, that actually he's a poor performer because he's not doing the initial tasks well, he's only solving problems. But how does he do that in a way that doesn't sound like he's winging, or unable to manage his own employee, or even jealous of him because he has these relationships with the top executives? ADRIAN GOSTICK: And you're exactly right, Alison. This is a really difficult one because it's very easy to come in here and look like you're being a little petty. This guy's the hero, and I'm a little petty. And so, you talk about efficiency. You say, look, we're not as efficient as we can be because of this. You talk about the steps that you're going to take, because I got some of my people that may be distracted, let me tell you what's happening with Sam here, and we're not as efficient as we can be. So, we're going to put together a ticketing system, and we're going to make sure people live by this because this is what's been happening. We've got 10% of our workforce who are the upper echelon, who are very happy and 90% of the people who are ticked off, and we can't run a help desk that way. So, you have to try and bring it back to the business need. DAN MCGINN: That ticket system was an idea that I thought of as well. When you place an order at a fast-food restaurant, there's a little clock on the screen that starts ticking, and it does that because time-to-service is really, really important in that industry. It would make sense in this context that the moment somebody puts a ticket into the help desk, a clock starts counting. So, it doesn't matter what the rank of the person submitting the ticket is, the time should be the metric that the helper is judged on, whether it's the VP or whether it's the admin, start to measure the time it takes them to close tickets and incentivize them against that. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Adrian, I loved your idea about going to the senior leadership with some information on consequences. You could say, in one sense, 90% of the people rate our services very poorly because they're not being responded to in a timely fashion. You could also say, this is the percentage of time being wasted on dealing with senior leaders' technical issues because of this one employee. Cold hard facts do tend to work. ADRIAN GOSTICK: Yeah, there's no doubt. You come with your case ready. Because this guy's smart, you have to come in as if you're an attorney arguing a case before a jury here. And you've got to have your data and your facts that say here's how we can improve efficiency. And I love Dan's idea. So few teams do this. We did some work once with the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels, they're an elite fighter group, and they do these 200 performances a year, marvelous acrobatics in the air. And everything is verbal. I thought everything would be computerized, it's not. And you can't exactly go no, no, your other left. You have to be really careful when you're up in the air. But when they come down, I love this, what they did was they removed all their insignias of rank, all their lieutenant's bars, or their private's bars, whatever they had, and they would all sit around in a room and debrief each other. And they could say, somebody who was sweeping the floors could tell the commander of the group, you were off on your flight line. And he would say, yeah, I was, I was 50 feet off, and I won't let that happen again. And it's that idea of we're going to be very clear about what went right, and what went wrong, and there will be no elephants in the room. So, I think it's rare when teams really do that. And I think that's one thing that could help in this case. DAN MCGINN: I do think that part of this problem might be hard to solve because I've seen this in companies. Alison, do you have a favorite IT person? ALISON BEARD: No. DAN MCGINN: Oh, I do. ALISON BEARD: [LAGHTER] Who? DAN MCGINN: I'm not going to tell. I'm not going to play favorites. But I don't think it's uncommon. You do develop a relationship with these people, you get the sense that some of them are more responsive than others. It's like any other kind of service thing. This idea that everybody needs to be equal, you can't go to your favorite person, he is sort of bucking human nature in that, don't you think? ALISON BEARD: Yes, but if those executives begin to learn that the only reason they need to work with him so much is because he's creating problems with their computers, I feel like that might erode some of the trust that he's developed. But we seem to have skipped the idea of talking to this person directly. ADRIAN GOSTICK: Absolutely not. Of course, yeah, Alison, you're exactly right. And you know what, there's a very good chance he won't believe you, he won't buy into it, he'll want to know well, who said this, and you'll say, I'm hearing it from a lot of people, well, I don't believe so. So, there's a very good chance he's going to argue, but you still have to try. But you're right, Alison, of course, that's where we have to start. ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I think it's really important when he does have a direct conversation with the employee to come in very matter-of-factly with information, not make it person, make it very much about what the team's goals are, and outline what this means for him professionally, that you will be talking to senior leaders if this doesn't change, and that might change his status with him. DAN MCGINN: Adrian, instead of a random ticketing system where problems go to whichever IT person is available, should our letter writer assign cases, and do so in a way that the problem person is not getting all the senior people? ADRIAN GOSTICK: Yeah, I think this is the last kind of idea here that we might have with this issue, is that the manager does need to be a little stronger. The manager can take control of certain issues. One, that the manager says, look, I'm going to be doing the assigning from now on. And also, at this point, if everything is tried, and you've failed, you can control other things. You can control this person's ability to even get a raise. You can control this person's ability to work from home. What's the perk this person likes. At some point, you might get to that point that a manager has to exert some sort of influence to try and get the work in the performance parameters that he or she is looking for. DAN MCGINN: Alison, what's our advice? ALISON BEARD: We have two suggestions. First, it's always worthwhile to have a direct conversation with difficult employees. You come to that conversation armed with facts about his underperformance, how it's so important for everyone to play their roles and serve the entire organization. But you can also explain the consequences, that if his behavior doesn't change, you plan to talk to senior leadership, you might change the assignments he gets. It's probable that because this person does seem to be rather diabolical in his playing of office politics, that our letter writer will need to start working the senior leadership herself. We think that she should talk about the consequences for the organization. Perhaps the percentage of people who are unhappy with their service, the percentage of time being spent on unnecessary fixes. And then we also would like to see her suggest solutions. Her handling reassignments in a different way, even instituting a ticketing system that takes some of the choice out of the process and debriefing to get everyone working more efficiently in solving these tech problems. DAN MCGINN: Dear HBR: I lead a diverse 15-person team at an IT company. We're all from a variety of backgrounds professionally, technically, and personally. One woman is our resident deep technical expert, but I've heard from her teammates that she hoards information and gets upset when she's asked to share her knowledge. There are communication issues, and she is poor at time management. She's always showing up late to meetings, missing them, or proposing reschedules. She often fails to follow through on action items. I don't want to over-generalize, but she comes from India where the corporate culture is more hierarchical, so maybe the problems stem from the fact that she is a middle manager, while the majority of the team is junior to her, with only a couple of peers, and a couple one level above her. When I've tried to talk with her about all this, she redirects to other team issues. When I ask her how things are going in areas where I know that there are interpersonal conflicts, she tells me, great. I've tried different ways to give her feedback at various times, and in various areas, but she usually defends herself and rejects it. She says she's being unfairly scapegoated. I've had similar conversations with others on the team, and they're open and receptive, so I don't think it's my style or delivery. How do I have these conversations with her in a more effective way? ADRIAN GOSTICK: This one is really interesting to me. I do a lot of executive coaching, and yesterday I was on the phone with a fellow who, it took us about 45 minutes, and everything was great, everything's fine, I'm beloved of my people. And yet, there was a reason that the organization had asked me to coach him. But nothing would break through until finally, I did suggest doing a 360 with his people. And at that point, he did kind of say well, I guess one thing they might say is that I'm kind of Doctor No . I've been here a long time, and I know what will work, and what won't, and I just don't want to listen to all their ideas. I'll tell them right away: this won't work. All of the sudden, we started opening up, and we started finding out the way he was being perceived. And so, I think this is a little what's happening here. This again, as we think about that idea of toxic versus difficult employees, I think this is just a difficult employee who is really overwhelmed. And I think probably would stand to benefit from maybe a little coaching, a 360 on her so that she can see how she's being perceived by others. ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I came at this letter really disliking the knowledge hoarder that's being described, but then I looked up some research that we've published that is really interesting and made me empathize with people who do have a lot of knowledge in organizations. Sometimes it's because they fear they're going to lose a competitive advantage, but it's often just because they are too pressed for time, and they feel that all these other people are depending on them, and always asking them for stuff. That pressure causes them to just seize up, and say: I can't, I don't have the time to do this. In one study, people would even pretend that they didn't have the information. And so, I feel like if we can find a way to break through that women's natural reaction, feeling pressured like everyone's coming to her, and she doesn't have the time for it, that's what our letter writer needs to do. ADRIAN GOSTICK: I couldn't agree more. I think that's exactly right. The first place we start is that she actually might be that busy. And you're right, the first time you might hear this, you might dislike this woman as this hoarder, and I've known somebody like that. But then as you think about this a little more, you might realize that she just doesn't even have 30 seconds sometimes to explain stuff to somebody because it's going to last five minutes, and I know it will! And so, I think there's a few things we might be able to do as leaders to help her. One would be to backfill, cross-train somebody else in what she's doing. DAN MCGINN: What about this business of her being hierarchical and paying too much attention to that? Is that a mindset that a manager can try to make less of an issue for a subordinate? Is there a way to sort of open her mind to people being equal regardless of who's a manager, who's a direct report, who's a vice president, who's not? ADRIAN GOSTICK: There were a few things I noticed in that. First, off he asked, he said, well, I don't know if this is an issue or not, but she's from India. And well, that's not an inclusive mindset today, so that's probably not a good mindset for this manager to have coming in. And now, let's say this person, this woman we're talking about here does have an issue with the level of person, well, then it is something to talk about. And like we talked about in the last issue, this is really not something that we can have, but again, it becomes a values-based discussion. It becomes an issue of we're going to help everybody, no matter where they are in the organization, we're going to respect. But that has to be a value that we really believe in our team, and we live up to. It can't just be lip service. I have to see it in you, my manager, and I expect it in my employees as well. ALISON BEARD: I completely agree that, as we said before, a direct conversation with this employee. And as you said, Adrian, making it easier for her. So, first of all, this is something we really care about, and we're going to incentivize you to do it. Secondly, what's the best way for you to do it? Should we assign you a mentee who you pass everything to, and then they pass it to the rest of the organization? Dorothy Leonard who's a former HBS professor has written a lot for us on knowledge cascades, trainings, challenge sessions, campfire meetings, just all different ways to get knowledge out of one person's head and disperse it to the organization without taxing that one person who has all the expertise. So, I think just a brainstorming session with her might help her be less resistant to change and being confronted and criticized. ADRIAN GOSTICK: One of the things as you sit and chat with this woman about this process, and I love Alison you're talking about the team: We're creating a team environment here, and how do we move forward? And she has got to be able to have the humility to say, I'm willing to change, and I need to change. And that's okay to have the courage to then move forward and to try this, but also to have the discipline to stick with this because as a manager, hopefully, you're going to be meeting with her at least once a month and saying, okay, how are we doing. And you're going to set aside at least an hour for this. And you're going to take a little time, because this is just as important as all of her other deliverables to help her grow, and develop, and become this team player that everybody needs. ALISON BEARD: I love that idea of ongoing coaching. DAN MCGINN: Adrian, when you hear that she's late to meetings, failing to show up, failing to follow up on things, she sounds like she has some organization problems, and time management problems. Is that an area you would attack here? ADRIAN GOSTICK: It's a good question, Dan, because we are making the assumption she's overwhelmed, she's incredibly taxed, she's putting out a lot of product. And one of the things that a manager has got to figure out, first off, is really: is this person producing all this output as well? One of the simple ways you can do that is Monday morning asking for a weekly check-in, saying what are you working on this week, great, okay, so these are your goals, these are your deliverables, great. Next Monday morning we're going to meet, and if you find out those deliverables are the same pretty much week after week, then you've got an issue that she's really not accomplishing all that you're thinking is happening, and then there really is a time management thing that's going on here, or a performance issue. But if she is crunching out a lot of stuff, then it might be also a prioritization issue. It might be the problem is she doesn't know which issues are the most important, and this is something that a manager can really help with, helping her understand these are the top five issues that you should be working on this week. ALISON BEARD: Let's assume that she tries to talk to this woman, encourages her to change, but she's still faced with this defensive posture rejecting that there's even a problem, what's the next step for our letter writer? ADRIAN GOSTICK: The last step really, after you've tried this as a leader, is to the idea that maybe somebody on the outside can help, maybe a coach can help. And this might not be a long process, it might be three months or six months, and it doesn't have to be tremendously expensive, but this is obviously a valued employee from what I'm hearing here. So, if this team member is that valuable to them, find them a coach who can help them, somebody from the outside. Sometimes just an outside perspective can help shake us up and help us realize that maybe we're not being perceived in the way that we should be. ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Dan, what are we advising our manager? DAN MCGINN: We see a couple of issues here. Clearly one of them is the way that this woman is managing her time. Maybe she needs more resources, they need more staff, maybe she needs help prioritizing, maybe she needs weekly check-ins. So, this issue of time, constantly running late, and dropping deliverables, we see that as part of the problem. The larger issue here is one of respect and values, she's not treating her co-workers with as much respect, that she's acting as if she's above them. We think this is probably not a cultural issue, and we don't think the fact that she's a native of India is p probably not a good mindset as a manager to assume that's the cause of this. We'd like the letter writer to have a direct conversation with her, let her know this is a problem, maybe do a 360 to show data and evidence that this is a problem, help her recognize that she needs to change. If nothing else works, consider an outside coach who can help her with both of these issues. And it might be as short as a three-month engagement in hopes of finding some results for this person. ALISON BEARD: Okay, let's go to the last letter. Dear HBR: I've been a senior manager in the home office of a membership organization for more than a decade. We have less than 50 employees, and most are women under age 40. Two people on my team come from non-traditional work environments, they sit next to one another in cubes, and have become best friends, a social powerhouse in our small office. Both are exceptionally good at their jobs. But here's the problem, they share the same dominant personality traits, and their mood or activities tend to set the tone for their whole work area. When challenged they're very good at seeming to be team players, but in reality, they're cliquish, and even subtle bullies. If there were only one of them, I probably wouldn't be writing this letter, but they gang up on everyone, including me. Due to their independent work, I don't always know where they are or what they're doing. Neither seems to think they need a boss, and that's pretty clear in how they treat me. They're not out and out rude, but I don't feel any support. I'd like to separate them, but our office can't accommodate that right now. I should note that they'd be surprised to hear themselves described this way. Many of us simply work around them, rather than inviting conflict. My question is, how much should I let them get away with as long as they do their work, and do it well? Co-workers at various levels tell me I should clamp down, exert my authority, and make them report what they're doing. Leaders above me see their professional limitations and are quick to call me out on their behavior when something goes awry. But micromanaging is not my style, and since much of their unpleasant behavior is subtle, I have a hard time telling them where the line is between okay, and not okay. When I provide corrective feedback they understandably want specifics, but they're so adept at cover-your-ass behavior that the examples I give end up looking like opinions that can be debated. I've involved our HR manager, and he agrees I'm in a tricky position. I've managed talented difficult people with success before and can tolerate it, but I'm weary of the conflict. Do you think one or both of the women have to go? Experience tells me they could be replaced, and life would go on. Or is there something else I could do to mitigate these issues? Wow, Adrian, what do you think about this one? ADRIAN GOSTICK: Now this is, now when we were thinking about is this person toxic, or are they difficult, these two are toxic, there's no doubt. And yet, I see a couple of big issues arising first up with this. The one problem is with the manager. You've got two younger employees, or junior employees I should call them, who aren't paying attention, and the manager needs to be more assertive. This is a weak manager who needs to, who's letting two people run amuck, and that's just not appropriate. The second big problem is with this HR guy who says, yeah, you've got a problem. And it's like nobody's helping each other here. I would say there's a big problem as well where this manager says, look, this is not my strong suit, I don't like to micromanage people, I expect people to be grown-ups, HR I need you to help me. And so, I think both of them working together, HR and this manager, both of them have a role in this that's going on, whose issue is this? Now, of course, these two employees are toxic, and we need to deal with them as well, but I think that's the first place we start is looking at the behavior of the manager, and the behavior of HR. ALISON BEARD: And even pulling in some of those leaders that are criticizing the employees, and how the manager's handling them, but then not offering suggestions for how to fix the situation. ADRIAN GOSTICK: Absolutely. Managing people is hard. We are all crazy in our own way, and these two are just being allowed to run amuck. And this manager has to bring them together, or probably better separately, and say, here's what's going to happen, this is not appropriate behavior, I can argue with you, but something has to change here. You're not happy because I'm hearing lots of things, and I'm not happy with this behavior. And so, while there's some limitations of space, I'm sure, you can still separate these people. You can move people around, and they can be removed from each other. And the question is, do you fire one, do you get rid of both? Well, I think first off you start seeing if you can change this behavior. The good part about this, unlike the question we had a few questions ago, they don't have senior leadership support, they don't have HR support. Really, the only thing that's stopping them from improving their behavior is a manager who needs to be a little tougher here. DAN MCGINN: Yeah, this idea that I think it would improve the situation if I moved them apart in the office so they were no longer in adjoining cubes, but I just can't do that right now, I agree with you, we should lean a little bit harder on that, think creatively, find a space. I think location drives a lot of human interaction, and simply putting them 50 feet across the floor from each other could have a really profound change. And I think I'd urge this manager to get creative on solutions for that. ALISON BEARD: But I think that direct conversation that Adrian was suggesting is important first because I think that if my manager separated me from my best friend without explaining to me why I would get pretty ticked. Hopefully, Amy never does that to us, Dan. I think being very firm with them, you said, Adrian, completely agree with you on that that a direct conversation needs to happen immediately. DAN MCGINN: I wonder if this letter writer is feeling enough urgency around the potential personal costs that she could experience here. She says leaders are quick to call me out on their behavior when something goes awry. It sounds like there's a set of people that are getting fed up with our letter writer too, that she's not handling this very well. I wonder if she has enough urgency not around just sort of this is a problem I need to solve, but this is a problem for her in her career. ADRIAN GOSTICK: And I think the dialogue that you two are having is excellent because I think one of the things that as you sit down with these two independently, one at a time, you really have this discussion, and it has to be very clear that you aren't happy, I'm not happy, we have to come to an agreement, and I'm going to give you some time, but it may take six months, we're going to put this in place, I'm going to create some documentation, but it's taking a lot of my time and resources to manage this, and we've got to figure it out. Now, if my way doesn't work for you, that's okay, you won't be able to work here, but it's okay because we're all going to be a lot happier. And they need to know in very clear and concise terms that their jobs really are on the line with this, that this behavior cannot continue because right now she is the one being blamed for all of this. ALISON BEARD: How can she better enlist support from HR, from the senior leaders? Adrian, do you have any ideas on that? ADRIAN GOSTICK: Absolutely. This is one where this manager, and she's admitted I'm not the best micromanager, she needs intervention from HR. Which means HR will be involved in these conversations because they're going to throw up smokescreens, they're going to say that's not right, they don't sound like dummies, these two, and so there's going to be a lot of verbiage that's thrown at this manager. This manager needs the HR guy in there with her. The second bit of intervention that she needs from HR is training, that she needs these two to be coached, or brought in, or trained, or maybe the whole team needs, and there are appropriate respectful behaviors within the workforce that have to be respected. And again, this comes back to that idea of creating some values. DAN MCGINN: Yeah, I question whether the notion that you can just move one of them out is realistic. It sounds like their performance is okay, and as she says, a lot of their behavior is subtle, it just seems like it's not apparent to me that they've crossed an egregious line that would warrant termination. So, I wonder if her hands are a little bit tied on that front. ALISON BEARD: Especially because they are such good performers. She's not just going to have to replace one solid employee if this solution is firing them, she's going to have to replace two. ADRIAN GOSTICK: I hear that a lot, especially government organizations, or organizations with perhaps unionized employees where a manager will tell me, I can't just fire somebody. And so, it's a really good point is that the first step you always take is to try and work through this. But there may be other options where you might within different parts of the organization, be able to move people transfer them out, create new opportunities that don't involve your particular team. Sometimes a second chance can be just as good for somebody else on another team breaking these two apart. DAN MCGINN: Alison, what's our summary? ALISON BEARD: So, first we want our letter writer to recognize that this is a really big problem. She has a set of toxic employees on her hands, and people are starting to blame her for letting the situation fester. We think that she needs to talk to them, probably separately, be firm, explain that their behavior is inappropriate and that it needs to improve, outline all the ways that should happen, even mention that HR and senior leaders of the organization agree that there's a problem, and let them know that their jobs are on the line. While at the same time acknowledging their strong performance and explaining that they're valued. We think it's wise to enlist HR and other managers either in these direct conversations or in supporting team training about appropriate behavior, even coaching for these particular employees. There are creative solutions like splitting them up, but we think that this is a problem best tackled directly, and with a lot more backbone. DAN MCGINN: Adrian, thanks for coming on the show. ADRIAN GOSTICK: Dan, Alison, it was a real pleasure, and thank you so much. HANNAH BATES: That was executive coach Adrian Gostick in conversation with Alison Beard and Dan McGinn on Dear HBR: . Gostick is a coauthor of the book Leading with Gratitude . We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. When you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at This episode was produced by Curt Nickisch and me, Hannah Bates. Curt is also our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Ian Fox, Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
Harvard Business Review
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Harvard Business Review
What All Leaders Can Learn from Taylor Swift
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard. Anyone who's been following pop culture over the past decade knows the story of Taylor Swift. An aspiring teen songwriter moves to Nashville and becomes a country music ingenue, then a country star. She crosses over into pop and becomes a star in that genre too, while also dabbling in indie rock. She wins multiple Grammys. She breaks album sales and streaming records, and then she does a two-year stadium concert tour that is an absolute sensation, the most popular and highest grossing of all time. At age 35, she is now probably the most famous woman on the planet. That kind of ascent takes a whole lot of talent, no doubt, but it also takes business savvy, a clear vision, an innovative mindset, smart collaboration, and clever marketing. HBR's own senior editor, Kevin Evers, has done a deep dive into what's made Taylor Swift so successful, and he says there are lots of lessons for corporate leaders, and in fact, anyone trying to get ahead in their career. He's the author of the new book, There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift. And he's here today to talk about how to bring a little of her magic to your own organization. Kevin, congrats on the book. I'm so excited to have you here today. KEVIN EVERS: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. ALISON BEARD: First, I want to make sure that you disclose this at the top. You are a longtime HBR editor, a very serious business journalist, but also a longtime Swiftie, thanks to your daughter Macy, right? KEVIN EVERS: That is true. Yeah. My daughter is eight years old now. She's been a Swiftie for the last four years or so. She's a hardcore fan. ALISON BEARD: And so, you're bringing some fan biases to the table? KEVIN EVERS: Maybe a little bit. I did go into this trying to write a book from a neutral and authoritative standpoint. But some of the fandom and my relationship with my daughter definitely played a little bit of a role in the writing, for sure. ALISON BEARD: What do you say to people who might be initially skeptical that there are actually things everyday managers, and even C-suite leaders, can learn from this pop star, this once in a generation talent? KEVIN EVERS: I've heard a lot of the skepticism. It did not take much soul-searching, I'll be perfectly honest with you. Taylor Swift has been in the music industry for 20 years. She's more successful and popular now than she was 20 years ago, and she was very popular 20 years ago. She's a great songwriter. She's exceptional at songwriting, and that's contributed mightily to her success. But she has great entrepreneurial instincts. And the fact that she's a female pop star made it even more interesting to me, because the music industry is fickle, it's a cutthroat market. But she's been able to find success and scale that success and popularity multiple times. ALISON BEARD: So, after doing all of this research on her rise in longevity, what is one key business applicable lesson that really stood out to you? KEVIN EVERS: The first one is her fan obsession. She reminds me of Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos, in a very famous shareholder letter, I'm going to paraphrase here, said, 'Our customers are delightfully dissatisfied. They may tell us that they love our services and that we're doing a great job. But deep down, our customers always want more. And it's our job to delight them and to use their dissatisfaction to drive innovation.' And I think that fits Taylor to a T. She understands that superstars aren't self-made, they're created by fans. So, she goes above and beyond. She has sent her fans Christmas presents, she has invited fans into her home for listening parties. And we saw this at the Eras Tour. She could have played two hours, two and a half hours and I think her fans would've been happy. But she plays three and a half hours. She devotes a mini set to every album in her career, except her debut. That's going above and beyond. But this is the reason why she's been able to build such long-standing relationships with her fans, because she doesn't take them for granted, and she's always looking for ways to delight them. ALISON BEARD: Talk about how she figures out what her fans want next. How does she figure out how to not just adapt and change, but make the right changes, make the right decisions? KEVIN EVERS: I think she has an innate sense of what they want, but she's also a lurker. She's online all the time, and she's our first extremely online superstar. She's used social media to great effect throughout her career. But she's always lurking in those message boards. She's always lurking on TikTok trying to understand what her fans want and trying to find new ways to delight them based on what they're saying on social media. She's notorious for doing things like this. ALISON BEARD: And community building is a big piece of it too, right? So, what lessons can consumer-facing companies take away from the guerrilla way that she's done that, made people feel as if they have an intimate connection to her even when she has millions of fans and followers? KEVIN EVERS: Her fan community at this point resembles true-crime communities on Reddit. There's so much speculation on what she's doing. And Taylor has changed her strategies recently. She used to have a lot of direct contact with her fans on social media, and she doesn't as much anymore. There's more scarcity to her strategies these days. But that has actually increased engagement, because whatever she does, whether she wears something on an outing and gets shot by a paparazzi, or she's at an event, whatever she wears, leads to a lot of speculation. And whatever she says on social media leads to a lot of speculation. And a lot of it, she's fueling this fire. She's dropping hints in everything that she does, so every interaction that she has with a fan has potential meaning. And that's really driven engagement, especially in this TikTok era. During the Eras Tour, between two and 300 million videos were viewed a day at the peak of the Eras Tour about Swift. So, she really has this innate sense of building curiosity and engagement with her fans. ALISON BEARD: It's almost like gamification of being a fan. KEVIN EVERS: For sure. For sure. And it's in her lyrics too. I don't think she's trying to game the system with her lyrics, but I do think that it leads fans to speculate. Everything she does increases some sort of engagement with her fans. ALISON BEARD: Her initial fan base was this, at the time, untapped market of teenage girls who might be interested in country music. So, talk about how she knew that was a market to be tapped, and then how she convinced others in the music industry that she could be the one to do it. KEVIN EVERS: This is a classic entrepreneurial story. She seized an opportunity that other people were ignoring. Let's go back. She's 14 years old, 15 years old, and she's trying to make it in country music. And she had a very clear vision for what she wanted to do, and she was very headstrong about this. She wanted to write her own songs, which at the time was rare in country music, especially for someone her age. It's usually done by professional songwriters. And she wanted to write those songs for an audience of her peers, teenage girls. That was a market that executives and country music, based on data and based on past failures, said, 'That market doesn't exist.' And she wanted to put out an album as soon as possible. And country music said, I think you need to wait, right? There's no market for this. But she said, 'I listen to country music. I'm not hearing songs that talk about my own perspective. My friends are listening to country music.' So, she was really close to her fan base, her customer base. While others in country music, they looked at the data and they looked at past experiences and they said, 'I don't think this is going to work.' But it did work. It's a classic blue ocean strategy, and this is something that Marvel did also in the 1960s. She went after an audience that people didn't think existed. And because of that, she found great success because she really didn't have much competition once she broke through. ALISON BEARD: So then, how did she expand her fan base, especially when she was entering the really crowded pop music scene, without alienating what we would call her core customer? How did she go big while also maintaining that intimate connection? KEVIN EVERS: Classic adjacency strategy. She made sure, and her team made sure, not to alienate country music. So after her first album, after that first breakout in country music, they still maintained a country first attitude. All of her singles went to country radio first, and then they released new versions to pop radio stations. So, they really made sure that those relationships were fostered and cultivated in country music, while at the same time expanding into pop music. So, she was able to expand her audience into the pop market while not alienating country music at the same time. That's a strategy that she used the first three, three and a half albums of her career, and it worked really well for her. What's unique about Swift is she was able to transition out of Teen-Dome. That's something that a lot of artists struggle to do, right? But because she's been able to transition out of that, it feels like her fans are growing up alongside with her. So, that core fan base has always remained. And then, of course, she's evolved her sound over time at the same time. She moved to pop music. She's recently moved to more of an indie rock sound, and that has brought in new consumers, new fans. ALISON BEARD: There's an authenticity, I think. She evolves, but it's always authentically and reflecting who she is at the moment. And so, it's almost as if that's what people identify with. And I feel like you can see the same things in corporate America. The brands that always stick to their purpose or values are the ones that consumers really feel loyal to because they know what they're getting. So, this capacity for innovation and reinvention is pretty astonishing, even though she's, at her core, a songwriter, always authentic, et cetera, she has made some colossal changes in terms of her image, in terms of her music. And you say that's a result of productive paranoia. So, how did she avoid complacency that many people would feel being as successful as she was early on, and then, again, pick the right collaborators to ensure that she was changing just enough? KEVIN EVERS: Productive paranoia, it's a great term. And it fits Taylor to a T. She has voiced many times in her career that she was worried that her popularity would dwindle. This is something that most artists, especially musical artists, worry about. ALISON BEARD: And businesses, right? KEVIN EVERS: And businesses, of course. Look at the startup market, MySpace in 2006 was the biggest social media platform. And now, it's Facebook and TikTok, and MySpace doesn't exist anymore- ALISON BEARD: Right. KEVIN EVERS: Yeah. So, she's always had this fear that her popularity may dwindle. This is something that Elvis also stated. He said, 'I'm worried that the light will go out just as quickly as it went on.' And Swift has also voiced that one of her biggest fears is that her songs will sound the same, that her audience will feel, you're not growing. And this has really pushed her to make bold decisions at times when you wouldn't think that she really had to make such bold decisions. She made this huge transition to pop music in 2014. She left country music completely behind. She had three straight number one albums at that time. Her strategy of going after country music and pop was a great strategy. It was working really well for her, but she decided, because she's a personal brand and she's a songwriter, that her music was evolving, her personal tastes were evolving, and she thought it'd be much better for her and her fans if she chased what she was really passionate about. And in that case, it was pure pop music. That was risky, but again, it ended up really working out for her because she had multiple number one hits. And that album, 1989, is one of the best-selling albums of the 2010 decade. ALISON BEARD: So, the advice for business leaders then is to be paranoid, to always be questioning your market position and figuring out ways to pivot and capture new markets or move in a new direction so that you don't stay complacent? KEVIN EVERS: Yes, and be paranoid when things are going well. I think that's the key point here. And there's been research on this, Morton Hansen has done research on this. He looked at leaders across all different industries, and he found that the leaders who were productively paranoid, who were really trying to assess risk even when things were going really well, perform much better when things actually weren't going well because they were prepared to pivot and change when things changed. ALISON BEARD: You mentioned MySpace before and it is really amazing to think that Taylor started her career before the rise of all the social media platforms, before streaming. And she's now really thriving in this digital era. So, what were the key skills or strategies that she used to make sure that she's always ahead of the game when it comes to these new technologies? KEVIN EVERS: If you look at the Eras Tour and how successful it was, it was successful because Swift had radically adapted her strategies to account for the changing behaviors of listeners in the streaming age. If you go back to 2019, Swift had arguably plateaued. She wasn't growing as quickly as she had earlier in her career, so she made big changes. She used to have a very precious release strategy. It's a very classic traditional strategy. Every two years, she'd release a new album. It would come out with great fanfare, she'd make a big deal out of it, mass media push, she'd go on tour, she'd stop and then do it again. But around 2020 or so, she'd turned very prolific. In the last five years, she has released four studio albums and she has released four re-recordings. She has two more re-recordings to go. And rumors are she'll release a new studio album soon as well. That's a huge shift for her, that is so much content. And it's a strategy that Marvel has used, and Star Wars has used, and other companies that have great IP. It's really hard to engage consumers and fans and listeners at this stage because of streaming and the attention economy. But once you have their attention, it's important to continually engage them. And that's what Swift has done. And I don't think the Eras Tour would've received so much demand if she didn't change her strategy to adjust to streaming and our changing behaviors in the attention economy. ALISON BEARD: Now, she has been criticized for insinuating that a lot of these moves are intuitive, whereas people think, 'No, this is totally calculated. And you're more a business woman than you are a musician.' What do you make of that? KEVIN EVERS: I think her decisions are very intuitive, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's a good thing. She has a real innate sense of what her fans want and what she should be doing. She received an Innovator of the Year award by iHeartRadio a few years ago. And she said, 'I don't wake up every day saying, 'I'm going to innovate today.'' She really looks at the environment and she does what's best for her, and I think that's a big reason for her success. She's not a copycat. She really has an innate sense of what she should be doing. And we saw this with her re-record project, right? That's another decision that seemed kind of crazy on paper. She decided to re-record all of her old music. Not re-release it, re-record it. And she was essentially telling her fans, 'Don't listen to the old stuff, listen to the new recordings.' ALISON BEARD: And that was because her initial manager, Scott Borchetta, had owned the rights to the masters. He then sold it to Scooter Braun, a producer who Taylor didn't like or respect or trust. And so, she said, 'I don't want this guy to own my music.' KEVIN EVERS: Yes, exactly. It was a classic battle between people who own stuff and people who make stuff. And people who make stuff usually lose those battles because they don't have a lot of leverage. And Swift didn't have much leverage either, but the only leverage she had was the fan community that she had built for so long. I think she knew innately that whatever decision that she made, that her fans would rally behind her. And that's exactly what they've done, because those four re-recordings that she's released have been number one hits on the Billboard 200. ALISON BEARD: You mentioned that she is a woman in a male-dominated industry. How do you think that that's changed the way both she's perceived and then also the way she has operated and navigated in that environment? KEVIN EVERS: It's had a big impact on how she's perceived. Taylor's career follows a modified version of Newton's third law. For every positive reaction, there's an equal or greater negative reaction. And we saw this from the very early days of her career. Now, traditionally, artists who have predominantly female fan bases aren't taken that seriously. Can even go back to The Beatles. Now, The Beatles are, obviously, a sensation. But that term, Beatle Mania – there's this idea that female fans are more driven by emotion and they're not driven by logic. And this has affected Taylor in her career. She's gone through many controversies, especially earlier on in her career. We can go back to 2009 when Kanye West rushed the stage at the VMAs and took her microphone and said, 'I'm going to let you finish, but Beyonce had the greatest video of all time.' And what he was saying is, 'You don't deserve to be here. You're not talented enough.' And Swift was heavily criticized throughout her career for this. That her voice wasn't good enough, that she had a princess fixation, that her lyrics were twee. But I think what's really important about Taylor is that she has turned these moments into opportunities for empowerment for her and her fans. That even when she's faced these controversies and these harsh criticisms, she's doubled and tripled down on what she does best. And she did this after the Kanye controversy with her third album. She said, 'If you're going to criticize me, I'm going to write this album all by myself. I'm not going to use co-writers.' And then, she used that as a big selling point for the album. That was a big part of the promotional campaign. And she finds ways to improve and grow based on those criticisms, but also grow closer to her fans in the process. ALISON BEARD: There's also been a lot of reporting on the kind of leadership that she showed during the course of the Eras Tour. It was a massive operation. She wasn't, obviously, managing the day-to-day logistics of it, but she did oversee the team for two years. So, what most interested you about the way that she managed that? KEVIN EVERS: She's very humble. I've never met her in person, I've never talked to her, but- ALISON BEARD: Soon, hopefully. Soon. KEVIN EVERS: Maybe. Who knows? My daughter would be delighted. Yeah. She's very humble. Again, she's been doing this for 20 years. If she wasn't humble, or if there's something off about her personality, or if her persona or the way that she presents herself to the world was manipulative or a fraud, we would know by now. And even though she's very headstrong and she makes bold decisions, she's humble. I think she understands that she's not self-made, that she's created by her fans. And she's always had this innate sense that the people around her are just as important as she is. And we saw this when she gave bonuses to her truck drivers and her crew. Big bonuses, over $100,000 to her truck drivers. And you can see it in the Eras Tour. You can see that she's in control of every aspect of that production. And I think fans can sense that, right? I went twice to the Eras Tour with my daughter, and it was very clear that every detail was well-thought-out. It seemed like a very personal experience, even though we were watching a show with 70,000 other people. ALISON BEARD: It's interesting you think about the other musical acts that have been as commercially successful as Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Michael Jackson. The stories around them weren't necessarily that they were savvy business people, it's that they had good teams around them who knew how to make the best of their music and their talent. But with Taylor, it really does seem that she is the one in charge. So, did your research confirm that, that it's really her driving the show? KEVIN EVERS: Yes, for sure. You could see it when she was 14, 15 years old. You could see it at every… Every moment of her career, you can tell that she's the CEO of her own career. She has a great team around here. She runs her business like a small family business. Her parents are involved, her brother is involved, and many of the members on her team have been there since the very beginning. So yes, she is the CEO of her own career, and much of the decisions are driven by Taylor herself. But she also has a great team that she's been extremely loyal to over the last two decades. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And she trusts all of them too. KEVIN EVERS: For sure. Yeah. Without a doubt. ALISON BEARD: Just to wrap up, we've covered the business lessons for managers and executives, but I'm also really interested to hear what you think that each of us working in our day-to-day jobs can learn from Taylor. How can we make better career decisions based on what she's done? When Macy gets her first job, what's one way that you think she can bring a Taylor Swift sensibility to whatever workplace she chooses? KEVIN EVERS: What I would tell my daughter is, based on my own research on Taylor Swift, is keep creating stuff. Whatever you do, don't stop. There's so many times in our careers where we stall, we struggle. And Taylor Swift has gone through all of that. She's gone through many challenges and many controversies. But the reason why she is as popular and successful as she's today is because she's never stopped making music. She's never stopped. Every two years she's released a new album. Didn't matter what was going on in her life or what was going on in her career at the time. And of course, over the last five years, that output has accelerated. And I think that's really important. I just wrote a book and I want to take a nap. But it's important that I keep going, I keep promoting, and maybe I'll write another book. And I think that's important for all of us to know. We all hit plateaus in our career. We all struggle, but it's important to push as hard as we can every day. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Keep finding the thing that lights your fire, I guess, and pursue it. Keep going. KEVIN EVERS: And don't get complacent. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. KEVIN EVERS: That's something that Taylor Swift has never been, and that's complacent. She's always trying to adapt and grow. ALISON BEARD: Kevin, thank you so much. It's been terrific talking to you about this. KEVIN EVERS: Thank you. This was fun. ALISON BEARD: That's Kevin Evers, senior editor at Harvard Business Review, and author of the book, There's Nothing Like This, The Strategic Genius Of Taylor Swift. And we now have more than 1000 IdeaCast episodes, plus many more HBR podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager, Ian Fox, and senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast . We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Beard.
