"The value, the assets that these companies create, are not just dollars and products and customers and employees and contracts. There's also something else. I call it trustworthiness. It's the most underrated asset in the world today."
"Leaders have no choice in whether they impact others, but they have a huge choice in whether the impact is positive or negative. We will either inspire or we will infuriate."
"One thing that comes up a little bit more in Asia is this idea of hypocrisy. This idea that it's really important for someone to act consistently with the words that they espouse. One of the most powerful things that we can do as leaders is present ourselves as actually consistent with our vision."
An offhand compliment from a leader becomes praise. An offhand insult becomes a verdict. Nobody in a leadership role gets to opt out of that.
Three conversations from the BRAVE archive with three best-selling authors, and one thing they share: all three went and checked what everybody already assumes about leadership, and found the data pointing the other way.
Adam Galinsky is a professor at Columbia Business School, currently spending a year at NUS Business School in Singapore, and the author of Inspire. He explains the leader amplification effect, why the people we call great are characterised on two dimensions and excused on the third, and what he found after asking people on every continent to describe an inspiring leader and an infuriating one. The answers were the same everywhere, with one variation: hypocrisy comes up more in Asia.
Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup. Fifteen years on, he went back to the founders who used it and found many of them miserable, and many of them no longer recognising the company they had built. His argument: we taught people how to build and never how to protect it, trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and since 2008 the companies rated bad on governance have outperformed the ones rated good.
Nir Eyal has written three books on why we do what we do. He starts with the most uncomfortable pattern in his own office hours, which is people waiting months for a call to report that the step they never did didn't work. Then the mechanism: what stands between us and what we want is not information, motivation is a triangle of behaviour, benefit and belief, and we quit because we have never separated pain from suffering.
People, then institutions, then yourself.
Watch the full episodes:
E709 Adam Galinsky, Professor at Columbia Business School
E700 Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup
E706 Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked, Indistractable and Beyond Belief
00:00 Three findings that contradict what you believe
00:41 Adam Galinsky: you don't get to choose your impact
03:01 The Steve Jobs defence, and Mother Teresa
05:10 The captain of Flight 1380
07:07 Inspiring vs infuriating, and what Asia judges differently
08:57 Eric Ries: they built the companies and ended up miserable
12:09 Since 2008, bad governance has beaten good
16:31 Costco, Sol Price, and the locks that were changed
20:19 Nir Eyal: they read the book, they didn't do the book
23:48 Why visualising success backfires
26:52 Pain is not suffering
30:35 The thing nobody checked
Keywords: Startup leadership myths, Trustworthiness in business, Mental contrasting, Southeast Asia tech founders
