Fixing Friction: Eliminating The Forces That Make Work Harder with Hayagreeva Rao
Hayagreeva ‘Huggy’ Rao - Author of The Friction Project, Stanford Professor
Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, the Sociological Research Association, and the Academy of Management. He has written for Harvard Business Review, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Market Rebels and coauthor of the bestselling Scaling Up Excellence.
Episode Summary
In this conversation we unpack workplace Friction with Hayagreeva 'Huggy' Rao. Friction can be both good and bad in a workplace, knowing how to use it and how to eliminate it when it's doing harm is critical.
Huggy Rao discusses the concept of friction in organizations and how leaders can make the right things easy to do and the wrong things harder. He shares the importance of understanding the impact of bad friction and the benefits of good friction. The role of leaders as friction fixers is highlighted, emphasizing the need to be trustees of other people's time and to view the organization as a product. The three principles of friction fixers are introduced: being a trustee of time, treating the organization as a product, and celebrating doers. The importance of subtracting before adding is also emphasized. In this conversation, Huggy Rao discusses the impact of friction on human connection and organizations. He emphasizes the importance of reducing bad friction and creating good friction to foster connection and improve performance. Huggy Rao shares examples of how storytelling and embodying norms can enhance human connection and drive positive behavior. He also highlights the need for interdependence in organizations and the role of leaders in creating a culture of connection.
Key Episode Takeaways
Leaders need to understand the impact of bad friction and the benefits of good friction in organizations.
Friction fixers are leaders who make the right things easy to do and the wrong things harder.
Leaders should view themselves as trustees of other people's time and treat the organization as a product.
Subtraction before addition is important in reducing bad friction and creating space for good friction.
Leaders should celebrate doers and focus on creating a culture that values curiosity and generosity. Bad friction can damage human connection within organizations and personal relationships.
Reducing friction can create connection and improve performance.
Storytelling is a powerful tool for fostering human connection and transferring knowledge.
Embodying norms can encourage positive behavior and improve customer experience.
Episode Chapters
00:00Introduction and Personal Journey
02:11Discovering the Friction Project
03:06Understanding Friction in Business
08:21Practical Application for Leaders
13:58Friction in Group Settings
18:23Reducing Bad Friction and Adding Good Friction
26:21Leadership Principles of Friction Fixers
36:48Subtraction Before Addition
40:15The Damage of Bad Friction on Human Connection
41:21Reducing Friction to Create Connection
42:12Creating Connection through Storytelling
44:26The Importance of Interdependence in Organizations
45:27The Power of Connectivity and Replacing Surveys with Stories
46:28The Need for Good Friction in Organizations
47:42Using Friction to Improve Customer Experience
49:50Embodying Norms to Encourage Positive Behavior
51:22Bringing Good Friction to Governmental Organizations
About The Friction Project
The Friction Project is the latest book by Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton and is The definitive guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations.
THE FRICTION PROJECT: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder is written by bestselling authors and Stanford professors Robert I. Sutton and Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao. It presents a decade’s worth of research on what ought to be easy and what ought to be hard in organizations, and how to change things for the better. Based on their research, case studies, and hundreds of engagements with top companies, the authors reveal just how widespread this affliction is, and provide a roadmap for readers to take up the mantle and blaze a path out of the muck.
Our episode today with Huggy Rao unpacks this book and the incredible research conducted to help you discern between good and bad friction, and what to do about it.
Praise for The Friction Project
“Sutton and Rao have given us a thousand gems, each an invaluable insight on its own, reinventing management as the art of ensuring that things get done as they should without unnecessary struggle. Marshalling the crucial insights from classic works, as well as from the very latest studies, they make a convincing case for friction as a vital focus and offer countless practical suggestions that you can apply in your work. I guarantee that their profoundly humane arguments will win your hearts, change your behavior, and transform your companies.”
—Amy C. Edmondson, Professor, Harvard Business School, Author, Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well (Atria, 2023)
“I have found every place I’ve been to be filled with people who REALLY CARE about doing the right thing for the company. Sutton and Rao show how leaders who pay attention to friction - which kinds are
helpful and which are not—can equip these people with the right tools, build their trust, and make incredible progress as a result.”
— Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, former President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, and author of Creativity INC: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
To learn more about Huggy, and get a copy of The Friction Project here:
Connect with Huggy Rao on via his website and LinkedIn
Get your copy of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder By Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao
Episode Transcript:
For accessible access, find the full episode transcript below.
Intro (Alexis Zahner):
Imagine it’s 9:14am on a Monday morning, you’re sitting at your desk, the caffeine hasn’t even hit your system yet, and an email pops up in your inbox from your manager, a total of 1,226 words with an additional attachment of 7,266 words, and a request to spend the following saturday saturday in a brainstorming session on the mission of a new projects.
AHHHH, are you kidding, how frustrating? What would you do next?
Well in the case of our guest today Huggy Rao, he decided to write a book about it.
The Friction Project is The definitive guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations.
THE FRICTION PROJECT: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder is written by bestselling authors and Stanford professors Robert I. Sutton and Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao. It presents a decade’s worth of research on what ought to be easy and what ought to be hard in organizations, and how to change things for the better. Based on their research, case studies, and hundreds of engagements with top companies, the authors reveal just how widespread this affliction is, and provide a roadmap for readers to take up the mantle and blaze a path out of the muck.
Our episode today with Huggy Rao unpacks this book and the incredible research conducted to help you discern between good and bad friction, and what to do about it.
Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, the Sociological Research Association, and the Academy of Management. He has written for Harvard Business Review, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Market Rebels and coauthor of the bestselling Scaling Up Excellence.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (00:03.029)
Welcome to We Are Human Leaders. It's really exciting to have this conversation with you. We have so many questions, but we'd love to start by getting to know you a little bit better and to understand a little of the personal journey that you've taken that's brought you to the work that you're doing today.
Huggy Rao (00:26.076)
Wonderful question, Sally. This book, of course, the Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easy to Do and the Wrong Things Harder, was a wonderful collaborative adventure with my colleague, co-conspirator, comrade Bob Sutton. And the short version of the story is Bob and I live two streets down from each other in Menlo Park, California.
We love drinking wonderful wines, and we conspire to create more adventures so that we can drink more wine. So we do lots of things together. And it turned out that we wrote a book, Scaling Up Excellence, and that book did really well. And, you know, we'd spent, and the book was a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
Alexis Zahner (01:01.182)
Hahaha!
Sally Clarke (she/her) (01:01.926)
I love it.
Alexis Zahner (01:10.222)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (01:17.256)
And as we were teaching that book, one of the things is, we spent a lot of time trying to understand how companies are really scaling upward, outward, and becoming bigger. And one of the things we kind of chanced on as we were teaching material from scaling up excellence was the responses of
Alexis Zahner (01:29.122)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (01:43.888)
young people in high technology companies in the Bay Area. And I remember this person so vividly. He looked at me and he said, in my company, he said, I'm swimming in a sea of shit. I barely have my head above water. And he looked at me with the agility and said, and you expect me to show initiative and generosity? How is that possible?
Alexis Zahner (02:01.641)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (02:11.031)
Hmm
Huggy Rao (02:11.156)
And I sort of momentarily stumped. And I sort of gave an answer. And then Bob and I thought, you know, we really needed to kind of like discover what was sort of going on. And that was kind of when what we sort of came upon was, oh my God, you've got this huge tendency to psychologize burnout as though it's like an individual outcome. And individuals are the ones who've got to deal with it. Instead, we said, you know.
Alexis Zahner (02:38.064)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (02:40.44)
Burnout is the outcome of organization design and leadership. And that's kind of how we began our journey into the Friction Project. And as we did that, we realized while there was a lot of bad friction out in organizations, there also was good friction too. And so that kind of really created a puzzle for us and that's kind of how we got into the book. And so we sort of think that
Sally Clarke (she/her) (02:44.556)
Yes.
Alexis Zahner (02:44.942)
Mm-hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (02:48.929)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (03:06.68)
Really the challenge for leaders is to figure out, how do I make the right things easy for people to do by taking out bad friction? How do I make the wrong things harder to do by putting in good friction? And this isn't just for consumers, for employees by the way, it's also for consumers as well.
Alexis Zahner (03:28.486)
We love this idea of friction, Huggy. And as someone who has worked in a multitude of organizations from local government to bigger corporations, this book was so relatable, the case studies and examples that you offered in this book. And just for a moment, before we dive into some of that more Huggy, can we just take a moment to unpack what friction is and in the context of business, perhaps where it's helpful and where friction is harmful.
Huggy Rao (03:56.536)
Absolutely. Great question, Alexis. For us, the simplest definition of friction is it's an obstacle. And obstacles are double-edged swords. Some obstacles, what they do is they sort of make it very hard for employees to choose a more curious and generous version of themselves.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (04:05.155)
Mm.
Alexis Zahner (04:09.234)
Mm-hmm
Huggy Rao (04:21.88)
Because what these obstacles do to people is they infuriate you, they exhaust you. And you just kind of give up and say, what me being curious, what me being helpful, forget it. So that's sort of what for us bad friction is. Obstacles that prevent people from choosing a more curious and generous version of self.
By the same token, good friction consists of obstacles that prevents people from embracing an overconfident myopic or for that matter an ambivalent version of oneself. So the point is not to kind of like eliminate obstacles, it's to actually kind of figure out which kind of obstacle to take out and where to actually put an obstacle. So if I were to give you two quick sort of examples of...
Alexis Zahner (05:10.167)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (05:15.248)
good friction on the one hand and bad friction on the other. Let me begin with bad friction. We actually begin our book with that example, where Bob and I received an email from one of the functionaries in our university. I mean, 1200 plus word email with a 7200 plus word attachment and inviting us to donate two of our Saturdays and some deliberation.
you kind of wonder and say, is this really an invitation or is this really an impulsive assault? And predictably Bob shot off an irate note to our provost. So, you know, it just kind of, you look at that it's very clear that
Alexis Zahner (05:49.929)
Yeah.
Huggy Rao (06:02.468)
The person seeking to pursue a reform or a change, they completely change blind. They're viewing the change from their point of view. They've no idea what the human consequences are, how people interpret all of this. So.
Alexis Zahner (06:10.234)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (06:20.172)
By the same token, if you think of the good friction, good friction is any obstacle that slows down people so that they actually think a little more deliberately and carefully.
Like a simple example and a very compelling one for our listeners is in the state of Massachusetts, Blue Cross, one of the insurers, they were actually confronting a huge problem of overprescription of opioids. Well, how do you stop doctors from overprescribing opioids?
Sally Clarke (she/her) (06:52.298)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (06:52.704)
You can think of incentives and you can think of a lot of things. Finally, they hit upon the idea of introducing a little obstacle, a little bit of good friction. So they told the doctors, you're obviously the experts, you know your patient. Of course you can prescribe opioids, but when you do, you really need to write a one-page memo justifying that. And we'll actually get it reviewed by a panel of opioid experts.
The cost of writing that memo was on average around eight minutes or so, but that led to, if you can believe it, 21 million fewer opioid prescriptions in the state of Massachusetts. Just think of that. So simple obstacle. So good friction prevents you from sleepwalking, basically, in organizations. In this case, sleepwalking into decisions.
Alexis Zahner (07:32.023)
Well.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (07:33.601)
Mm.
Alexis Zahner (07:34.503)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (07:45.805)
Mm-hmm.
Alexis Zahner (07:49.656)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (07:50.077)
Bad friction wears you out.
Alexis Zahner (07:53.07)
Mmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (07:55.265)
Thanks for explaining that, Hagi. I think that gives all of us a really sort of very tangible idea of what good and bad friction looks like. And probably for a lot of us, you know, there's quite a few examples of the bad friction that come to mind. And so much of it, I think, simply goes unquestioned almost. It's taken for granted and it's almost taken as being a normal part of how we work in many organizations. So I can imagine there's a huge possibility.
realm of opportunity really for leaders to be able to really shift the dial in ensuring that we're reducing that bad friction, but also without simply, as you say, I have all these metaphors in my head of, you know, we don't want to sort of shooting down the fire pole or something, we need a little bit of good friction in there too to slow us down and to create those conscious moments of reflection. And just to sort of go deeper a little bit into that in terms of
Alexis Zahner (08:41.745)
We need a little bit of a few pictures in this. So we just hold it down.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (08:49.717)
what it looks like practically for leaders. And you use this beautiful term in the book of a friction fixer. And I'd love it if you could explain for us a little bit about what a friction fixer is and how they operate differently.
Huggy Rao (09:03.996)
Great question, Sally. So our big insight was leaders truly, great leaders are friction fixers. What do we really mean by that? I think what we mean by that is great leaders have a mindset where the first element of the mindset is I'm a trustee of other people's time.
So the worst thing in the world to do is to misuse, piss away other people's time and frustrate them and intimidate them. So the first thing is time is your scarcest kind of resource. So you respect that. The second thing is we of course sell products and services to customers outside, but leaders often don't think of their own organization itself as a product. You know?
Alexis Zahner (09:37.938)
Mmm. Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (09:59.984)
How easy is this product to use? How accessible is it? All of these kinds of considerations. So they just don't think of the organization itself as a product.
Now the moment you think of yourself as a trustee of somebody's time, and the moment you think of the organization as a product, the leader in a sense becomes like an editor in chief, if you will.
What do great editors and chiefs of magazines and movies and all these things do? On the one hand, they prune away things that frustrate, distract, bore, annoy, and infuriate readers. At the same time, they kind of make sure they create suspends. They sustain your kind of engagement. They make sure that there's a good threshold of procedures
there for an investigation to be done, in short, for a story to have legs. So that's kind of our view of leaders. So leaders really are editors-in-chief. And when we say they're friction fixers, that's kind of what we mean. The tragedy of all of this and...
Alexis Zahner (11:10.221)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (11:16.676)
Perhaps the hope for future improvement is very seldom do we see people in organizations evaluating senior-level talent and asking themselves, is this person a good friction fixer?
is this a leader who actually understands how to be an editor in chief. And it doesn't matter whether you're leading a team, whether you're leading a department, a business unit or an enterprise. It's the same set of considerations. So often what we do is we put in people into positions of power.
Alexis Zahner (11:31.863)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (11:55.056)
and authority where they really don't ask meaningful sort of questions about how time is even deployed. In one company, we asked the executive committee, hey, how long do you guys meet and how often do you meet? They said, well, we meet once a week, so that's like 52 meetings a year, 52 hours multiplied by six of us on the executive committee.
And I said, well, that spells out how much time you guys spend in the meeting. Have you thought of how much time the rest of the organization spends so that you can actually have this meeting?
Alexis Zahner (12:21.55)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (12:32.3)
and they hadn't thought of it. And when they did a little bit of digging, quickly they realized the rest of the organization was spending 300,000 hours a year to support this weekly one-hour meeting. Now, you can imagine, this company is spending a little bit north of 300,000 hours after we include the executive committee meeting. And so the question we posed to them is, like, what are you getting out of all this time? I mean, like, are you getting something, an insight that's worth all this money?
Sally Clarke (she/her) (12:33.799)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (13:02.574)
So you can take $300,000 or 300,000 hours multiplied by like some base wage rate. Let's say it's 300 bucks an hour or whatever it is the wage rate. And you can ask yourself meaningful questions. And I think that's kind of what we mean by being really a friction fixer. Somebody who's very... and somebody who really understands by implication how work gets done several levels beneath.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (13:08.375)
Mm-hmm.
Alexis Zahner (13:29.997)
Mm.
I think what's so fascinating about your work, Huggy, is that it gets to the core of this word that we hear used so often in business, and that is productivity. And people misplacing and misunderstanding where we can actually create better efficiencies, both as leaders and for our employees by actually looking more critically at where we're spending our time. And I love this example of
As someone who's worked in local government for a long period of time, I tend to find that organizations that operate in the public sector tend to have more red tape, more bureaucratic frustrations for their employees. And certainly that was my experience. But I also appreciate that example that you mentioned around where creating some level of friction actually forces us to change our decision-making. And one of the examples you had in the book was the Google glasses fail.
when that idea in particular was taken to market too early. But there was one quote that came out of it for me. And that was that you mentioned this quote that labor leads to love. And a lot of the work that Sally and I do with organizations is actually helping leaders to understand when to hold a group in tension or in friction and when to actually remove friction. Can you help us understand a little bit more what friction
in a group setting, like what are some of the outcomes of being able to hold a group in friction with an idea or with something like that in that setting? Could you help us unpack that a little bit?
Huggy Rao (15:05.084)
Absolutely. The first thing is, I love your emphasis on government. I think in the book, we have an example in the state of Michigan where they have this extraordinarily long questionnaire that you have to complete. Hundreds of questions, and out of which one was, can you please tell us the date on which your child was conceived? And I'm thinking, how many people would be able to answer this question? And it's not clear what decision.
Alexis Zahner (15:16.78)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (15:27.806)
That's so intrusive. Yeah.
Huggy Rao (15:33.056)
It's an input into. Clearly, the system is designed to cater individuals. And two of our students who created a company called Sivila, they actually worked with the government people and realized even the government people themselves were interested in changing things. So hopefully, I mean, there is hope in that sense. So for us, this gets to, your question, Alexis, gets us to friction forensics.
Alexis Zahner (15:35.208)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (15:59.991)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (16:00.12)
And one of the things you need to do as a leader is you've got to kind of do a little bit of forensic analysis. And the forensic analysis has to do with what's the nature of the decision we are making? Is this like a very costly to reverse decision? So the costly to reverse decision might be acquiring a company. That's like an extreme edge case. Launching a new product. All of those kinds of things.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (16:07.284)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (16:29.452)
And we call these decisions following Jeff Bezos. Think of them as one-way doors. You can kind of get in to the room, but you can't get out. Or it's kind of hard to get out. So hard to reverse decisions. So what we sort of recommend, and then by contrast, there are decisions where failure is sort of cheap. It's easy to reverse the decision. The cost of a mistake is low. All of those kinds of things. For us.
What you need to do is you've got to create good friction when people are making one-way door decisions or costly to reverse decisions. It could be as simple a thing as recruiting a senior executive into the C-suite to, you know,
acquisitions, divestments and the like. And on the good friction, on the bad friction side, part of what you want to do is, the most important thing in any company is, the two muscles are curiosity and generosity. So you've got to always ask yourself and say, how do I make it easy for people to be curious, to figure things out, to ask questions, instead of like, you know, careening around in confusion. And the other thing is, how do you get people to be
helpful. And I think, you know, and so to my mind, and so, you know, taking out bad friction often requires you to look at all of these things. One of the things what we found is if you don't take bad friction out
Our research kind of has shown that a big problem in companies is time poverty. And the difficulty is when you have time poverty, good people immediately begin to do bad things. So that's kind of where you got to take the bad friction out to reduce time poverty.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (18:23.051)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (18:31.072)
I could give you sort of study after study, but we really need to take time poverty out. And one first step in dealing with the problem of time poverty is in our book, we use a memorable phrase. We just tell people, hey, first thing you gotta do is you gotta mow the lawn. Who is mowing the lawn in your company is the question we ask people. And they look at you and see nobody's mowing the lawn. That's the problem.
Alexis Zahner (18:50.829)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (18:58.456)
Mowing the lawn isn't any department's responsibility. Now if you don't mow your garden or lawn regularly, it's going to be overrun with weeds. How can you put a new flower, a new fruit, or a new vegetable? There's just no way they'll thrive. They're actually going to be outcompeted by the weeds.
Alexis Zahner (19:07.973)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (19:16.76)
So one of the things we talk about therefore is, when you think of taking out bad friction, don't just think of it as an efficiency enhancing move. Instead, think of it as giving your employees the gift of time. And the moment you think of this as a gift of time, what do people do when you give people a gift?
Alexis Zahner (19:32.91)
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (19:33.505)
Think.
Huggy Rao (19:41.828)
they reciprocate. At least the evidence suggests that if I give either of you a gift worth one Australian dollar or one US dollar, or one euro or whatever, people respond on an average anywhere between three to seven Australian or US dollars or three to seven euros. So reciprocity is sort of a big part of that. And that's kind of where we really need to make the right decisions.
Alexis Zahner (19:43.255)
Mm-hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (20:03.154)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (20:11.488)
a big dent. So first thing, mow the lawn.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (20:17.133)
I love it. I think that's such a beautiful way of framing it, Hagi, of this kind of clearing space. And if I'm understanding correctly, it's also, this is where I'm seeing also the symbiosis of reduction of bad friction and inclusion of good friction being so important because I can imagine if we're simply reducing bad friction and we're 100% in favor of that, you know, understanding the impact that bad friction can have on engagement and on wellbeing. But if we simply do that and make things more efficient,
I can imagine that's quite tempting for leaders because there's this idea that if we were just more efficient, more efficient, we do see higher productivity, we can see more outcomes, more results. But if we can actually use that space that's created to implement some healthy good friction, I imagine that that's where some pretty amazing innovation can lie.
Huggy Rao (21:08.452)
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, I love your, you know, you've sort of made the gift of time into one that actually creates space and that's exactly kind of what it is. It not only creates space, Sally.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (21:23.945)
Hmm
Huggy Rao (21:27.908)
but it also reduces noise. So you can have a lot of space with a lot of noise and there's not much you can do. So part of what you want is you want space with as little noise as possible. Because noise is the biggest kind of problem. And I think if we take all of that out, the consequences as you point out for organizations are amazing. In our book, we have a case study of AstraZeneca where a team of 40 people
Alexis Zahner (21:38.9)
Yeah.
Huggy Rao (21:58.904)
I think in 2019 at AstraZeneca, they saved the company $2 million.
Now 2 million hours is roughly equivalent, at least when we wrote the case study, to 1248 full-time employees or FTEs.
But what's interesting is why were they giving people, they weren't interested in saving 1,248 FTEs. They wanted to give people two million hours back to do what? To serve four million more customers, to run 400 more early phase trials, 26 late phase trials, and the like. And we were interviewing this extraordinary individual who spearheaded this, her name was Pushkala Subramanian. Why, after they saved the two million hours, everybody said, my God.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (22:34.245)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (22:45.192)
your team should actually become a department. She said, see, that's where we need to subtract bad friction to. The moment we make ourselves into an organization is another problem. So they stopped. And I remember asking her, how was all of this elimination of bad friction done? Was it you and other members of this elite team who did it?
Or did it actually trickle down and seep to the rank and find she said well it did more than that
And she gave an example, apparently at AstraZeneca, people show work starts at eight o'clock. Usually people show up at 7.45 or whatever, and you gotta swipe your ID card, and there's like a little gate that goes up and down, and then you go. And every day, pretty much every work day rather, you actually had a traffic jam. A lot of people stuck with all this thing. And they had a word simplification the day before,
Pushkala Subramaniam goes to work and she finds there's no traffic jam. She asks the security guard, who is not even an employee of AstraZeneca, he's a contractual employee.
And she says, hey, what happened to the traffic jam and the gate and all this? And apparently the guy looked at her and said, madam, you had the world's simplification day yesterday, and all of you are giving people the gift of time. I thought I could give you a gift of time too. I could save you half an hour every day. We've figured out another way to get you checked in. I mean, who is thinking about it?
Huggy Rao (24:17.912)
Isn't that amazing? Now to me, that guy too is a trustee of people's time. I mean, he might be a security guard, but he's actually acting like an owner, acting with the mindset of, I'm a trustee of other people's time too. It was like very, very uplifting for me to listen to that particular book end to the story.
Alexis Zahner (24:41.098)
And I think, Huggy, this idea of leaders taking personal accountability for that is so important as well. And I'll just speak to my own experience working in local government. And you mentioned earlier that when we create too much friction for employees, it can cause good people to do bad things or to change their behavior. And certainly I know when I was working in local government, I was often referred to as a bit of a rogue operator.
Um, because I found myself so constantly frustrated with the bureaucracy and my manager at the time, thankfully for him, we, we did find ourselves in a little bit of, you know, hot water here and there because he sort of had the motto, let's just do it first and ask for forgiveness later because we were so sick of the red tape. Um, and we were really motivated employees. So we found ourselves doing, um, unfavorable behaviors within that organization.
because we couldn't get the work we needed to get done simply because of the paperwork, which is so frustrating because our job is to serve the community. And we felt like we could not serve the community as a result of the bureaucracy. And if you are an intrinsically motivated person, I will assure you from my personal experience, there's nothing that will kill your internal generator quicker than too much paperwork. So I love this idea of the leader being the personal trustee of this, because I think it helps us to
take accountability and when we take accountability, we can do something about it. And I wanna dive into this a little bit more, Huggy. You mentioned in the book that there is these three leadership principles of friction fixes. Can you explain to us what these are and why they matter?
Huggy Rao (26:21.485)
So the three friction fixing principles, the mindset I've already, in a sense, high-touched on two of them, the trustee of time, the product. The third thing is, what you wanna do is, you wanna celebrate doers. Because those are the people who actually get things done.
And the thing is, all the time, what you want to do is, as a leader, you are constantly trying to see, what are the ramps to push you to achieve your goals?
Alexis Zahner (26:42.935)
Yeah.
Huggy Rao (26:55.408)
bad friction in an organization, and you were trying to kind of head them off at the pass, so to speak. So in our book, one of the things we talk about is one ramp to bad friction, and why there is this tragedy of the commons. Oh, you know, you have a garden that's untended, it's not mowed, overrun with weeds. How do all of those things kind of happen?
Alexis Zahner (26:57.941)
Mmm.
Alexis Zahner (27:09.71)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (27:19.64)
Well, one of the reasons, one ramp. So we think of this as like a freeway. There's just like a giant crash unspooling.
vehicles crashing into one another, you can't see it. And that everything grinds to a halt, things become slow, agonizingly, achingly slow, and frustratingly so, when I think of your, you know, government examples, be it at local state or federal governments. So one ramp to that kind of bad friction, the deluge of bad friction, one ramp is...
Alexis Zahner (27:28.535)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (27:58.424)
if you will, myopia on the part of senior leaders. Senior leaders often can be myopic for two reasons. One reason is they actually...
Sally Clarke (she/her) (28:08.1)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (28:14.032)
They have power. And what the research and power shows is the more powerful you feel, the less you search. Because when you have power, you don't have uncertainty. There's no reason for you to search. Who searches? People without power search. Hey, why did this happen? You know, all that. So they have a lot of illusion.
Alexis Zahner (28:22.15)
Yeah.
Huggy Rao (28:33.348)
The other thing is one study shows that people at the C-suite don't know how work gets done three, four levels beneath them, and so they underestimate coordination difficulty. So they just think it's easy to do. So you've got this kind of myopia stemming from power and underestimation of coordination difficulty, and what does that do? It hardens into impatience.
Alexis Zahner (28:46.995)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (28:59.772)
And so why can't we do it faster? Why can't we do it quicker? And then part of what you're doing is you heap key performance indicators on people. I wrote an article in the McKinsey Quarterly called accountability isn't a word, it's an equation. For most people, accountability is a word. For me, accountability equals account or key result area or key performance indicator multiplied by ability.
Alexis Zahner (28:59.847)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (29:29.452)
So when you go to organizations, people are focused on the account part of accountability. Nobody is thinking about the ability part.
So how do you stock up ability? Well, you don't ship people off to educational courses and the like. The simplest way to actually improve and boost ability is to give people the gift of time. Because then I can be curious, I can be generous, and the like. And we just don't do enough of that. And there are stories galore of organizations where they impose.
Alexis Zahner (30:00.15)
Hmm
Huggy Rao (30:08.912)
KPIs on people and not worry about their ability and the result is Good people engage in wrongdoing. They do bad things in our own Bay Area the Showcase example is a bank called Wells Fargo
Sally Clarke (she/her) (30:26.556)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (30:27.524)
They put a lot of pressure, so several investigations revealed. The CEO was ousted, bonuses were clawed back, a law firm was called in to investigate. And when they came in to investigate, they wrote a report about an edge city in Arizona. Apparently, in this edge city, there were around 10 banks or so. Roughly 10,000 customers might have been a little more. All of them deviate amongst the 10 banks. The key performance indicator for Wells Fargo employees
allegedly according to this report was, you have to come up and establish 1,000 new relationships. Well how are you going to do this in a town where there's no growth in population? So what did employees do? They created fake credit card accounts, fake loans, fake this. And all of these people presumably were people who go to church on Sundays, coach little league baseball, you know, volunteer at the non-profit and do all these things that good people do.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (31:12.619)
Hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (31:24.353)
Good people.
Huggy Rao (31:26.008)
Yeah, good people can easily do bad things, and that's kind of the tragedy of organizing.
Alexis Zahner (31:29.004)
Yeah. Mmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (31:33.661)
And what stood out to me as you're speaking, Hagi, was this sense of, and I know this deviates a little bit perhaps from the core of what you cover in the book, but a sense of humility that is important for leaders to be able to bring. And not necessarily humility in order for them to learn everything about everything, but humility to understand that they don't fully understand the process and that that's okay, but to sort of hold space for that, to allow that. And to then...
based on that to give people more time to do what they need to in the process.
Huggy Rao (32:05.172)
Completely. Without humility, you won't have curiosity. If you don't have humility, the outcome is overconfidence. And if you have overconfidence, the second outcome is myopia. And as you were asking this question, Sally, what was crossing through my mind is the lovely example of the CEO of Office Depot, a chain of stores here in America. Imagine both of you are the CEOs of this company.
Alexis Zahner (32:09.319)
Mm.
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (32:26.253)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (32:32.208)
You get two reports. You've got mystery shop, Office Depot sells, you know, phones and computers and so on to small business people. So you get one report from your mystery shoppers. They go there and they say, you know, it's brightly lit, it's clean and people are wearing uniforms and this, that and the other. You're acing these surveys from mystery shoppers. But as the senior, you get another report and the other report is your same store sales are going down. And you're thinking, how is this possible?
Sally Clarke (she/her) (32:40.448)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (33:01.656)
My mystery shopper said, I'm doing great, and then we're not selling enough. So what does this CEO do, to your point? He says, I better find out. And so how am I going to find out? Instead of calling a meeting, I'm going to head over to a store, park a car, see what the hell happens. Store opens at 9 o'clock, a lot of inbound traffic. And the guy says, thank god.
People are going into the store. And five minutes later, the people who have gone into the store, they're all coming out without any shopping bags. And he says, that's crazy. All these people went in, and they're coming back empty handed, how come? He goes in, and he sees instantly what the problem is. Right when the customer's coming in 9 o'clock, the store employees, they're actually very busy stacking product on the shelf.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (33:48.129)
All right.
Alexis Zahner (33:48.141)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (33:49.308)
The first thing the customer sees is not the face of the employee, but regrettably the backside of the employee. Well, how long would it take until this guy finishes the shelving of the products? You know, you walk out. Why were they doing that at 9 in the morning? Because the warehouse people thought, well, the best time for us to ship product to your store is 7.30 in the morning or 8 in the morning. Nobody ever thought of doing it from the customer's point of view. So...
Alexis Zahner (33:55.531)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (33:59.34)
Yep.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (33:59.86)
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (34:16.637)
Yes. It's such a fantastic approach. I think that's, yeah. And I think that's such a wonderful example, Huggy, because it's so practical and it's so obvious when you say it. And yet I think there are so many examples in organizations around the world, even as we are speaking right now that are occurring, where that is simply happening and that is ongoing and no one is really looking at the why and having the humility and the curiosity to be able to drive over and check it out.
Huggy Rao (34:18.724)
You know what I mean by humility.
Huggy Rao (34:43.332)
Yeah, because if we don't do something about how we design organizations to produce this excess of bad friction, what are we doing to the people who work for organizations? I mean, to me, I mean, I hope I'm not exaggerating, but I sort of wonder sometimes that employees, when they go to companies, they've got to deal with this onslaught of bad friction and they come home exhausted. And
Alexis Zahner (34:43.488)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (35:11.221)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (35:11.588)
when they come home to work, the only thing they have for their family is the scraps of their self. Like, how can you come home with a few scraps of yourself? Like, I don't know how that's kind of possible.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (35:18.125)
Mmm.
Alexis Zahner (35:18.784)
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (35:23.961)
Yeah. Well, it's, you're hitting me right in the heart here, Huggy, because I went through a burnout as our listeners know, I went through a burnout as a finance lawyer. And I know from my own experience, how little of me was left in the moments when I was at home and what a disservice I did to myself and my loved ones as a result. And if we think of that at scale, it's kind of scary.
Alexis Zahner (35:24.654)
Hmm.
Huggy Rao (35:40.028)
Isn't that amazing?
Yeah!
Huggy Rao (35:46.376)
it's monumentally scary, you know, monumentally scary. And then, you know, there's a...
I don't know how to describe it. It's kind of like you, you saw it go, you're kind of exhausted, you say, oh my God, I got another problem. I gotta organize dinner. Let's call out for dinner. And you're not, and the meal that's supposed to be an occasion of joy and togetherness and so on and so forth, it becomes one of like, oh great, you watch your TV and you do things. I'm gonna do my email. Is that the way to live life? I'm not sure. I don't think so.
Alexis Zahner (36:08.841)
Yeah.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (36:09.47)
Mm.
Alexis Zahner (36:15.579)
Mm-hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (36:16.262)
Yeah.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (36:20.085)
Well, this is why we're so grateful to have these kind of conversations with people like yourself, Huggy, because we really do see that there is a movement of people who know that it can be done differently and who are shifting gradually in that direction. And that's where we find much of our hope. You know, there's something you mentioned in the book that I did want to touch on specifically, and this is this, I hear it a lot, and I've had a lot of conversations recently with leaders around this idea of how tempting it can be to sort of add things on when we're thinking of
you know, adding to people's to-do lists. And we work here, you know, with leaders to help build healthier cultures. And it can be quite a process for them to understand that we often need to subtract before we add, or that needs to be a process that where both are occurring. I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about what friction fixes do differently here.
Huggy Rao (37:10.06)
Yes, so I'm so glad you touched upon this addition bias that we have. There was actually an article several months ago in Nature that showed that all of us come with this addition bias. We know how to add, but we just don't know how to take it. And that's part of the problem. So one of the things we talk about in our book is what friction fixers do is, they actually are very good at
doing good riddance reviews. And so we're actually having an article coming out in the Harvard Business Review called, Rid Your Organization of Obstacles That Infuriate. I think is the title that they finally have sort of agreed upon. And how does this work? It could start with the simplest of things.
Alexis Zahner (37:54.583)
Mm-hmm.
Alexis Zahner (38:03.863)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (38:04.704)
In our book, we talk about a wonderful example of Dr. Melissa Ashton, who's in Hawaii with a healthcare operation there, and she came up with a super simple but lovely idea of getting rid of stupid stuff. Now, why can't...
Alexis Zahner (38:21.066)
Seems that simple.
Huggy Rao (38:22.528)
Yeah, why can't central government, why can't governmental organizations, businesses, nonprofits and the others actually tell their employees, hey guys, get rid of stupid stuff. So when I teach this to our executives who come here at Stanford, I just tell them, imagine you're going back. You're launching an initiative called Get Rid of Stupid Stuff. It is only allowed one rule.
Alexis Zahner (38:44.441)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (38:48.949)
and that rule should only cannot exceed four words and that rule should instantly be understood by a tenure.
Alexis Zahner (38:57.398)
Hmm.
Huggy Rao (38:59.356)
So how are you going to do that? And most of them, when they think about launching a thing, it's like a lot of bad friction. Oh my god, you got to do this, you got to do that. They do the adding. Here, it's all deliberate sort of subtraction. How would you do that? And when you really push them, it's amazing. They actually come up with pretty interesting ideas.
You know, one rule is throw out trash or make sure you save time. I mean, simple little things that a 10-year-old can get, you can use that in the organization. So that's certainly one place where you can actually begin by getting rid of stupid stuff. Simplest of things to do. Nothing complicated. There are other things that you can do. So one of the things we talk about in our book is the rule of how.
So imagine you only had 50% of the resources to do this. What would you actually eliminate? And then you eliminate a bunch of things. And then you say, what if we only had 25%? 50% of the resources again, which becomes 25% from the original. And then you do that one or two times, you really begin to question a lot of things that you do. And many of them we don't really need.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (40:13.823)
Mm.
Alexis Zahner (40:15.982)
Hmm. And yeah, and Huggy, one thing you touched on in the book as well, I guess, a byproduct of bad friction is that, and this is something Sally and I are very passionate about at Human Leaders, and that is how human connection can actually be damaged with the presence of bad friction. The example you used was human connection at a grocery store chain, or one of the examples in the Netherlands, which to me demonstrated the
the damage of human connection between the brand and its employees and the customer. But I imagine obviously internally to an organization as well, it damages human connection now into personal relationships as well. Can you just speak to that a little bit for us as well? And perhaps some of the ramifications of what that damaged human connection might look like for an organization?
Huggy Rao (41:05.465)
Yeah, if I were to recruit a metaphor, Alexis, I think it's like the explosive spread of a cancer. So the problem is the biggest cancer in organizations is indifference to other people.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (41:14.136)
Mmm.
Alexis Zahner (41:14.404)
Mmm.
Alexis Zahner (41:21.706)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (41:22.076)
But bluntly, when we're dealing with a lot of friction ourselves, we just don't give a shit about other people. We think of ourselves as independent people, operating in an atomistic market or whatever. We don't think of ourselves as interdependent cells. And so that's the kind of fraying of the connection, the loss of the connection. So a lot of the times, what you want to do is you actually want to reduce friction in a way that
Alexis Zahner (41:26.642)
Yeah. Yeah, we don't have time.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (41:31.855)
Mm.
Alexis Zahner (41:38.584)
Mm-hmm.
Alexis Zahner (41:43.228)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (41:51.152)
creates connection. Let me give you an example. So in the wars in Afghanistan that the US fought, you had forward operating bases, you know, in the hills of Afghanistan. So American soldiers would be sent there. They had a deployment time of three to six months and then they would be rotated out and new people would be sent.
come in their place. And the army's modus operandi was the returning soldiers were asked to fill out a survey. And typically, like any bureaucratic survey, pages and pages long, most people wouldn't fill it out. They would do some analysis. Nobody would do that. And it so turned out that a general from there came to Stanford. And he said, you know, we have this problem. What can you guys do about it?
Sally Clarke (she/her) (42:29.617)
Mm.
Mm.
Huggy Rao (42:44.068)
Bob and I thought, great, this could be a fantastic project for our MBAs. So we gave it to our MBAs, and they came up with a brilliant idea. And their idea was, hey, first, how do we motivate soldiers to actually share their experiences with an incoming soldier? So they told the soldiers, hey, you spend 10 minutes talking to the soldier who's actually going to take your place. We'll give you, in those days, we'll give you an hour of Skype time to talk with your family.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (42:48.932)
Mmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (43:13.269)
Hmm.
Huggy Rao (43:14.256)
So, some of these predictably were fired up. But what was interesting was they told the soldiers, all that we want you to do is share during this 10-minute conversation, three short stories. What happened when you arrived? A story from the midpoint of your tenure and a story about you leaving and going back.
Alexis Zahner (43:14.49)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (43:36.764)
And sometimes I would listen into these stories, and invariably in these conversations, you would find the story of an ambush. We started early in the morning, we forgot our sunglasses. We forgot to check our comms. So we didn't know that the radios weren't working. We were under fire. We couldn't kind of call in air support. On and on and on the story goes. You can imagine how powerful and vivid these stories are.
Alexis Zahner (43:45.217)
Mmm.
Alexis Zahner (43:54.204)
Mm-hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (44:00.845)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (44:01.344)
And people are really prepared to do the job. So you're creating connection, you're transferring knowledge, you're doing all of this in a way that actually primes people to be prepared and ready to do the job. And now you can see we reduced the friction. No survey instead story. But we created a little bit of friction, too, by saying three stories within 10 minutes. Lest you.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (44:20.195)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (44:27.)
sort of get into a lot of irrelevant detail and the like. But I think the point is always creating that human connection. And when you create the human connection, what you realize is an organization can't be run if your implicit model of the organization is, as a leader, I'm the CPU, and everybody else is a peripheral. Organizations don't work like that. Great ideas can come from anywhere.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (44:52.776)
Mm.
Huggy Rao (44:58.)
In fact, the other day we had somebody from Stanford alum from Watsonville, California. He has a chocolate company and he came up with a new product. And I said, hey, how did you come up with this new product? He said, you R&D guys who figured this chocolate out? He said, no, it was my electrician. I said, electrician? How did he know of your chocolate? He said, well, he's a Latino. He came to me and said, why aren't you selling chocolate to my community? Here's a way you can do that. And bam, doors were open to a new market entirely.
Alexis Zahner (44:58.003)
Absolutely.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (45:14.962)
I'm going to go to bed.
Alexis Zahner (45:24.169)
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (45:28.745)
Incredible. And I think it's something that I don't want to get too off track here, but I think it's such an important message, this message of connectivity and almost replacing survey with story. I think that's an incredible takeaway for leaders as well in the sense that, you know, we live not only in a society which is highly individualistic, but then when organizations are the same sort of reflect that as well, then it so quickly leads to disengagement and to that, you know, that loss of something that is such
potentially has so much power for us as individuals and a collective.
Huggy Rao (46:00.432)
Completely, completely. But at the same time, I want to make sure we, while taking bad friction out is such an important thing, it's equally important to realize we've sort of got to put in good friction in organizations. Because absent good friction, we can all do a bunch of bad things pretty quickly. I want to sort of give you an example, even on the consumer side. So it's interesting.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (46:15.414)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (46:16.171)
Yeah.
Huggy Rao (46:30.176)
In Houston, there was this airline, and what happened is they would land the jet at Houston Airport and they would use a jetway closest to baggage claim. So it took the passengers a couple of minutes to get out of the aircraft and they'd go to baggage claim and they'd be waiting for five minutes. What kind of airline is this?
Such a delay in clearing bags and this and that. Now, you're the airline executive, you can of course design a baggage claim system at hideous expense to yourself to make sure, the moment people get out of the aircraft, the bags are ready. That's kind of prohibitively expensive. What did these guys decide to do? They thought maybe we should put in a little bit of good friction. They said, why choose the jetway closest to baggage?
Alexis Zahner (47:17.317)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (47:18.32)
where they take 30 seconds to walk and five and a half minutes to wait, will choose the jetway farthest from baggage claim. So they spend five and a half minutes walking, and by the time they walk there, they just say, wow, half an hour, the bags arrive, these guys are great. They don't change the blood. They just landed in a different jetway. I mean, now think of how simple that is. Think of how... Yeah, in...
Alexis Zahner (47:22.251)
Yeah.
Alexis Zahner (47:32.575)
Yeah.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (47:32.961)
Hehehehe
Alexis Zahner (47:37.164)
Yeah.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (47:39.889)
I think it...
Alexis Zahner (47:40.274)
and everyone gets a little bit more exercise. Ha ha ha.
Huggy Rao (47:44.984)
And it's kind of funny, you guys have traveled and been around the world. I've got to tell you, one of the funniest stories I've had is, I was actually teaching in one of our social enterprise programs, and there was this guy from Indonesia, Bali. And you guys know Bali way better than me. I've been there a couple of times. So I said, what do you do? He said, well, I'm a microfinance company. I said, ah. And I said, then.
Alexis Zahner (47:49.55)
Mm-hmm.
Huggy Rao (48:11.888)
How are you doing? He said, we're growing rapidly. I'm hiring a lot of people. I said, really? To do what? He said, well, we've got such a surfeit of applications. I'm worried people are lying in the applications, so we're hiring teams of people to scrutinize these applications so they read out people who lie, misrepresent, misstate. So I don't know anything about microfinance particularly, other than having some knowledge.
But I asked him, I said, hey, have you ever thought of making it easier for your customers not to lie? And he looks at me and he says, like, how do I do that? And I said to him, I don't know, you're the guy from Bali. You know, I've been there twice. My recollection of Bali is there are a lot of temples in Bali. He nodded his head and said, yeah. And I said, how many of your offices are right next to a temple?
You know, you put your loan application office right next to a temple, like what do you think? You think people lie right in front of a temple, a church, a mosque, a synagogue? Unlikely. You know, we walk away, we give ourselves the green light to do bad stuff, but in front of these buildings, you kind of think, you know, maybe I ought to do the right thing, you know. So it's like a pretty simple, and my point was norms are actually embodied.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (49:16.169)
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (49:34.451)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (49:34.872)
They're not out there. They're embodied. So anyway, so those are all examples of how we've got to think in a very simple kind of way, is the way I think about it.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (49:39.149)
Mm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (49:51.377)
I think, you know, Huggy, that's such a fantastic example and such a practical, you know, vivid example of what it actually looks like to bring some good friction, reduce bad friction in such a personal and relatable way. And I feel like we've had a masterclass in friction with you together. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for joining us on We Are Human Leaders.
Huggy Rao (50:11.28)
your time.
feel very kind. It's been a joy and a delight and I think all that all of us need to do is if we can make the world of work a little bit less miserable where people feel it's less of a grind, we can actually do things.
But let's make sure we create that friction. In closing, I can't resist one short story. This is in response to Alexis, who's double clicked a bunch of times on governmental organizations. So I want to talk about an organization where they did something simple, but quite clever, I thought. So this is kind of like a governmental organization because it was a monopoly gas supplier. So they controlled 98.5% of the market.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (50:43.296)
Mm-hmm.
Alexis Zahner (50:44.231)
Yeah
Alexis Zahner (50:49.691)
Mm-hmm.
Alexis Zahner (50:56.984)
Mm-hmm.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (50:58.165)
Right.
Huggy Rao (50:58.276)
You know, when you're a monopoly, do you really care about your customers? No, you treat them terribly. So what did the CEO do? He came upon a pretty interesting idea. He said, you know what, we're going to actually take a day off and I just want to get my employees and ask them to be the customer. And then they got a bunch of customers and said, you be the employees for the day. And the customers had a whale of a time mistreating.
you know, you know, the employee would come and, you know, the customer would say, hey, who are you? What are you doing here? And the guy would say, I've come here to pay the bill. Stand in line, you know, you don't have an appointment, you don't have this, you don't have that. And that was the employees feel like, oh my God, that's the way we treat our customers. Yeah. I mean, here's a guy who's come to pay the bill and your salary and what are you doing? You're crapping on the guy.
Alexis Zahner (51:25.678)
Hahaha
Alexis Zahner (51:29.559)
Yep.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (51:39.033)
I can imagine a certain level of revenge.
Alexis Zahner (51:39.798)
I love it.
Alexis Zahner (51:49.219)
Mmm.
Huggy Rao (51:50.236)
And you don't need to do that. So this was another way of recreating human connection as well by putting in a little bit of good friction. But very much, hopefully this spoke to the governmental angle there a little bit, at least, at Exos. So love chatting with both of you. Thank you for your interest. Thank you for your curiosity. And thank you for your generosity.
Alexis Zahner (51:52.162)
Mmm.
Alexis Zahner (51:57.567)
love that huggy.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (52:02.518)
Hehehe
Alexis Zahner (52:12.738)
Thank you so much, Huggy. And that just to comment on that final story there, it just demonstrates how sometimes we can have that sort of empathic disconnect from the end user. And when we're not sharing their experience, we forget that it can be a challenging one. So thank you so much for that final story there, Huggy. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. We are human leaders.
Huggy Rao (52:33.692)
Thank you so very much. Bye bye and enjoy the rest of the day.
Alexis Zahner (52:39.618)
Thank you so much, Huggy. It's such a pleasure to have you. We can't wait for the world to see this book. We're very, very excited. It was such a fantastic.
Sally Clarke (she/her) (52:40.577)
Thank you, Huggy.