Frances X. Frei

Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When “move fast and break things” began to define the innovation economy, the mindset fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other.

In Move Fast & Fix Things, leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed—and that it keeps you from building a winning company. Helping executives and entrepreneurs solve their toughest problems over the past decade, Frances and Anne learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false. The best change leaders solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their stakeholders—employees, customers, and shareholders—better off.

Based on their work with fast-moving companies, Frances and Anne reveal the five essential steps to moving fast and fixing things. You’ll learn to:

When leaders seek out advice, they’re often told to fix themselves. But should they? Leaders are constantly being told to develop their strengths, mine their failures for insight into what to change, and work to correct real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.

In Unleashed, leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this popular advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: build others up. Leadership isn’t about you. It’s about how effective you are at empowering other people—and making sure that this impact endures even in your absence.

Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, love, and belonging to create environments where other people can excel, Frances and Anne offer readers practical, battle-tested tools based on their work inside companies such as Uber, Walmart, Riot Games, and many others—along with interviews and stories from their own personal experience that make these ideas come alive.

Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance – for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the relationship.

In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategy no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision your company makes.

Frances and Anne reveal a transformed view of service, presenting an operating model built on tough choices organizations must make. Practical and engaging, Uncommon Service makes a powerful case for a new and systematic approach to service that boosts productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage.

Trust is the foundation for everything we do, in business and in life. But what should we do when trust is broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it, and rebuild it when it’s lost. "If we can learn to trust one another more, then we can have unprecedented human progress," Frei says.

The assumption embedded in Silicon Valley’s famous “move fast and break things” ethos is that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. A certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for creating the future. The authors have spent the last decade helping business leaders clean up that wreckage, and one of their main lessons is that this tradeoff is false. The most successful change leaders solve problems at an accelerated pace while also taking responsibility for the success and wellbeing of their customers, shareholders, and employees: They move fast and fix things. Leaders who tackle big problems don’t need to slow down, they need to take a breath and take a few mission-critical steps before sprinting, including: 1) Make sure you’re solving the right problems; 2) Build more trust as you go; 3) Involve people you don’t know—and who know more than you do; and 4) Tell a better story.

• Ground the service offering in specific service attributes.
• Build an explicit mechanism for funding the service offering.
• Set employees up to reasonably deliver the service offerings value.