Status Updates From Scaling Up Excellence: Gett...

- Guilt-prone people emerge as better leaders (study)- it is more effective than extroversion.

- Poster of eyes vs flower poster: which one made people more accountable

- Gene Pools: a company becomes the people it hires; Michael Dearing - founders have cognitive distortions (personal exceptionalism, dichotomous thinking aka “X is shit, Y is great”)

The people make the place AND the place makes the people.

- Freaky Friday Mmgmt Technique (changing dep heads for a week)
- Most successful teams are those with 2-3 team members who have worked together before
- Studies show that there is higher “collective intelligence” in teams with more women.

Subtraction as a way of life:
e.g. removing the days off HR system to regain productivity > employees take days whenever they want > took less
e.g. Adobe removing the yearly performance reviews and putting regular check ins

Being challenged:
e.g. Pixar’s creator of Ratatouille, Brad Bird being challenged by producer John Walker.
“It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darling than to kill your own”

“Snowballs are better than no balls” = clumsy solutions are better than no solutions

Breaking down an emergency department into smaller cross-functional pods had striking benefits (increased throughput). It introduced coordination costs among the pods and ironically introduced/moved inefficiencies in other areas. A local optima vs global optima scenario.