Joel Podolny’s career spans business school education and corporate training at the highest levels. He’s the former head of Yale’s business school and founding dean of Apple University, where he oversaw learning in leadership, management, and company culture. Podolny now is co-founder and CEO of Honor Education, a platform for collective, asynchronous learning used by companies and institutions including Stanford and Wharton.
We recently sought out his perspective on the new playbook for leadership. Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for space and clarity:
You’ve been a business school professor and dean, you’ve started Apple University. What are the traits of modern leadership that stand out for you as most essential, especially the ones that may be emerging to the fore?
Number one is the ability of a leader to really drive meaning in the organization. There’s a lot of research showing that especially those who are joining the workplace now or who are younger are looking for meaning in work. And they should be. People spend the vast majority of their days devoted to work and if they can’t find meaning in work, that’s a pretty big gap in terms of the amount of energy and activity. So that ability to infuse meaning, to connect the work that people do to the vision of the organization, to interact with people in a way that affirms their importance as individuals and to the organization all goes in that bucket of meaning making.
Number two—and this was based on my experience at Apple—I came to believe that having a clear expertise as the anchor for one’s leadership as opposed to being a general manager was especially important in those organizations, as so many are, where the environment that they’re in is facing considerable change, where the ability of the organization to innovate and adapt is critical to succeeding in that environment. Because you need a level of intuition around what problems haven’t we solved but we will be able to solve in order to compete successfully that can only come from really being grounded in one’s expertise and the work that is being done.
Number three—I don’t know if it’s more important, less important, but it is absolutely critical in a turbulent and changing world—is to really have a deep curiosity around when things happen that are unexpected, unpredicted. You lean in to, ‘Why is this different from what I expected, and what does that say? I now need to question some assumptions that I have.’ In a lot of ways, we as individuals are hardwired to dismiss, at least initially, events, experiences, data that are inconsistent with what our priors have been. But, given the way the world is, the ability to meet the unexpected with curiosity is really critical.
In the first category—the ability of the leader to drive meaning—what are the tools that leaders have for that which you taught leaders at Apple or elsewhere?
One is being a great storyteller. Story makes vision tangible. Story has an emotional component and an emotional appeal that strictly presenting tables and figures doesn’t. Good organizational stories are also easily retold and remembered. One of the things that I was always struck by at Apple was how many people would tell me stories that they heard that Steve [Jobs] or Tim [Cook] had told. That’s really the mark of a culture. It’s not just that the leader tells stories, but the people are good at retelling the story that the leaders told.
A second one is the ability to move back and forth between the macroscopic big vision and the real small details. One of our faculty at Apple University was a business historian by the name of Richard Tedlow, and Richard would sometimes call to mind that line from the Blake poem about being able to see the universe in a grain of sand. That ability to see the universe of the vision in the grain of sand of the work that somebody is doing, and to move back and forth between the two, is also really important.
What is a story that people at Apple would retell?
It’s a very old example, but it was one that I loved telling: When Steve was leading the Macintosh team, one of the things that concerned him was the amount of time it took the computer to boot up. He was encouraging those who were working on this to shrink it by, let’s say, 20 seconds. The people at the time were like, ‘There’s a certain amount of things that have to be done when it boots up. You can’t reduce it by 20 seconds.’ And he goes to the board and he starts running through something like, ‘Let’s just say 5 million Macs are sold. Let’s say with 5 million Macs being sold, they boot up the computer once a day, so 365 times 5 million.’ He starts doing the calculation, and somewhere in the recesses of his mind he had the number of seconds that a human being lives. Where he basically worked it out to was, you’re going to save two lives every day if you can get that computer boot up time reduced by 20 seconds.
I just loved that. It’s such a perfect example of us all thinking, ‘Twenty seconds here or there, what does it matter? People are drinking their coffee when their computer’s booting.’ But he’s like, it matters. That’s unused, unproductive, unmotivating time. The person has turned on their computer, they want to do something, and we’re getting in the way of them doing it. So let’s give life back to the world.
You mentioned the second thing was having a clear expertise as an anchor for someone’s leadership. What is an example of the clear expertise you’re referring to? Also, people are often appointed to positions of leadership because of their expertise and then not equipped for the work of managing—how do you square that?
Hopefully if that third characteristic is there—curiosity—that helps the person who’s moving from being the functional expert to the person who’s a leader. Whatever people’s gifts are, the ability of somebody to learn how to lead, if they’re willing to be open to the possibility that everything they do could be a mistake and wrong and something that they can improve on, then you can get from functional expertise to leadership.
By the way, I’ve come full circle on this and I completely get the argument. I began as a teacher of MBAs. The MBA degree is the same degree regardless of whether somebody is going to be using it to work in finance, consulting, industrial manufacturing, start an entrepreneurial company, or run a Fortune 100. The belief is we teach leadership, we teach management—it’s kind of the same. But—and this was just observing in my 12 years at Apple—leading a software team is different than leading a hardware team if only for the simple fact that with hardware, you need to lead in a way to have a team that is incredibly open to, when there are the inevitable bugs, how can we rapidly fix and improve them?
I remember talking to a hardware engineering leader who said, ‘Until I have seen somebody fail—and they need to fail—I can’t trust them, because we’re all going to fail at some moment. And it’s how they respond in that failure that’s when I can trust them, that they acknowledge it, they take ownership and accountability for it.’ That’s not to say that’s not of some value in software, but software is about agility, that ability to iterate and lead a team that works that way. So different work, and the expertise around that work helps a lot.
The last thing is with respect to innovation, it’s hard to have the intuition—that we’re onto something, we haven’t solved all the problems, but I know we will—unless you’ve got the experience and the expertise.
Read a full transcript of our conversation, including more on the importance of being able to “unlearn.”