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Seeing Around Corners: Two Key Factors for Bringing Your Organization Through an Inflection Point, with with Rita McGrath, Professor of Business Strategy, Columbia Business School, and Author, Seeing Around Corners
1. Trust
A big factor that I don’t think gets discussed enough when you think about what leaders need to do to bring the organization through a major inflection point is, the organization has to trust you. You know, people have to have a sense that even if it makes them uncomfortable, even if it’s in contrast to something we’ve always done, even if might make our current model for success obsolete, that you have the right direction and that you’re willing to articulate a way to get there.
So one of my heroes in this is Satya Nadella who’s the current leader of Microsoft. And, you know, he asked a very successful, very highly regarded organization to basically leave everything they knew behind, make a big bet on, you know, web-based services, completely step away from their shrink-wrapped software business that they’ve been exploiting forever. And he had to build up a lot of trust. So there’s, there’s an example that I think brings this to life.
So one of the things a lot of tech companies are really trying to figure out is how artificial intelligence is going to cause humans and machines to interact differently with each other. And so we’re still at a very early stage. You know, we’ve got some early use cases and early models, but it’s still pretty primitive, I would say. And so what some of the research team at Microsoft did to try to understand this sort of human to machine interaction is they created this artificial intelligence chatbot named Tay. Tay was supposed to have the personality, I think, of like a teenage girl. And the idea was they would release Tay into the world and people would interact with it on Twitter and Tay would learn how they like to be interacted with and eventually would get smarter. And it would be more like talking to a human.
Well, Twitter, unfortunately, is not a very welcoming place for new experiments. And within about 48 hours, Tay had been taught to be, you know, this racist, homophobic, Nazi, just horrible, horrible things that people were throwing at this chatbot, you know, on Twitter. And it caused a huge uproar. It just, it caused enormous embarrassment for Microsoft because, come on, you guys are supposed to be ahead of this, and yet you had this horrific mistake. But, what Nadella did was he sent a note to the head of the research team who’d been in charge of this. And he said, look, you know, none of us knew this was going to happen. It was unfortunate. I think what you’re doing is directionally correct. We obviously need to try something a little bit different. But don’t worry, I’ve got your back. That builds trust. And if you don’t have that kind of relationship, that team would never have experimented. And you know, I don’t know what they’re doing now behind the scenes, but my guess is going through that experience has moved Microsoft ahead of where a lot of other companies would be had they not had that kind of experiential catastrophe.
2. Growth Mindsets
One of the things that I really admire about Satya Nadella and what he’s done at Microsoft is he’s actually used Carol Dweck’s theory of growth versus fixed mindsets. And that’s become core to his leadership philosophy. He’s actually had Carol out a few times, I think, to, to talk to them. And she’s, she’s an acquaintance of mine. I think the world of her. But the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset is, if you go at something with a fixed mindset, there’s a right and a wrong answer. I want to be right. And I don’t want to be wrong. I’m afraid of failure. So what I tend to do is confine myself to things that I know are going to work out. In other words, a fixed outcome. With a growth mindset, on the other hand, you strive to become better. So rather than saying, I am good, you try to say, well, I’m going to be better.
And if you’re going to be better, that means you need to try things. You need to make investments in the future. You need to be kind of learning from your mistakes rather than trying to avoid making them entirely. I think it’s a hugely important thing. And Nadella really has made a big effort to instill that as a cultural norm at Microsoft, which I have to say would be a company, you know, in previous regimes where it was all about talking smart and being smarter than the next person. And, you know, being the one with all the answers rather than the one who’s going to work together to find the answers.