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
https://youtu.be/MhVfGQ8iI7I
E700 Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup
https://youtu.be/8wihh7uYpRo
E706 Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked, Indistractable and Beyond Belief
https://youtu.be/4eM2OOMyruA
Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/leadership-authors
BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia.
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#Leadership #SoutheastAsia #Founders #Singapore #TechPodcast #Management #Startups #VentureCapital #BusinessBooks #LeanStartup #Psychology #FutureOfWork #Productivity #CorporateGovernance #SEAstartups #Malaysia #Indonesia #Philippines #Vietnam #Entrepreneurship
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
